Belvidere native Jeanne Gang named Order of Lincoln recipient
Rock River Current
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SPRINGFIELD — Belvidere native and world-renowned architect Jeanne Gang has been named a 2025 recipient of the Order of Lincoln, the state’s highest honor for professional achievement and public service.
Gov. JB Pritzker announced the recipients on Friday. Gang will be honored along with:
- Bonnie Blair: The first American woman to win five gold medals at the Olympic Winter Games.
- Sandra Cisneros: An award-winning poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Her novel “The House on Mango Street” has sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than 25 languages.
- Janice K. Jackson: The CEO of Hope Chicago and the first Chicago Public Schools alum to serve as CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
- Carol Marin: A long-time journalist who has worked with WMAQ-TV Chicago, CBS News, Chicago Sun Times, “60 Minutes,” and the Evening News with Dan Rather. She has won multiple Emmy and Peabody awards for her reporting.
- Julieanna L. Richardson: The founder and president of The HistoryMakers, a Chicago-based nonprofit that maintains a nonpartisan, digital, archival collection of African-American oral histories.
“With world-renowned achievements in athletics, literature, architecture, education, journalism and history, the 2025 class of Lincoln Laureates embody the very best that Illinois has to offer,” Pritzker said in a news release announcing the recipients. “I am proud to uplift their incredible contributions and to award these talented men and women our state’s highest honor.”
Gang, a 1982 Belvidere High School graduate, is a founding partner of the international architecture and urban design firm Studio Gang.
“Known for a distinctive design approach that expands beyond architecture’s conventional boundaries, she creates striking places that strengthen connections between people, their communities, and nature,” the announcement of her Order of Lincoln honor reads. “Her diverse portfolio across the Americas and Europe includes the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History; a new United States Embassy in Brazil; and an expansion of the Clinton Presidential Center. A MacArthur Fellow and a Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.”
In 2019, Gang was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
Gang also designed the Starlight Theatre in Rockford and the 82-story Aqua Tower in downtown Chicago, which was the world’s tallest building designed by a woman when it was finished in 2009. She was named the 2016 Woman Architect of the Year by the Architectural Review.
Gang and the other Order of Lincoln recipients will be honored in a ceremony on May 3 at the Krannert Center for the Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Order of Lincoln awards were established in 1964 to recognize individuals who have made remarkable contributions to the betterment of humanity in or on behalf of the state of Illinois. Gang joins more than 350 distinguished Illinois residents who have joined the Order of Lincoln over the last five decades.
Recent local winners include pianist and songwriter Emily Bear, who received the honor in 2018, and Maj. Gen. John Borling, who received the honor in 2021.
