Julieanna Richardson

In May 2012, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Howard University during the school's 144th Commencement Convocation.

Richardson has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards. She currently sits on the Honors Council of Lawyers for the Creative Arts and she was appointed in 2011 to the Comcast NBCUniversal African American Diversity Council.

In 2004, the HistoryMakers received a grant from the IMLS to create a unique digital archive in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. The digital archive, which went live in 2006, includes more than 310 interviews (800 hours of footage) and has 3,500 users from 51 countries.

In February 2000, she conducted her first interview, with the black radio executive Barry Mayo. Other subjects followed, many of them well known: Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Julian Bond. But an encounter with William Thompson, a veteran of World War II's all-black Tuskegee Airmen, convinced Richardson that the HistoryMakers was about more than just celebrities. When they met, Thompson told Richardson about the Golden 13, the thirteen black men commissioned as officers by the navy during World War II. What is more, he told Richardson that one of those men — William Sylvester White, then a judge with the appellate court in Chicago — was waiting upstairs. Richardson ended up interviewing both men, who have since died. "It was one of those moments when I knew I was on the right path," says Richardson. "It wasn't about names, but about finding history in places where people didn't know history existed."

In 1985, Richardson founded Shop Chicago, a first-of-its-kind regionally based home-shopping channel reaching 750,000 cable households in the Chicago market and featuring local vendors and retail establishments. Shop Chicago set standards for regional TV home-shopping ventures and received international attention with its combination of home shopping and infomercial formats. Other investors in the television home-shopping service included William Bartholomay, vice chairman of Frank B. Hall & Co. and vice chairman of Turner Broadcasting System; Jerold Solovy, a partner at Jenner & Block; and Patricia Koldyke.

In the 1982, Richardson served as the City's Assistant and later Chief Cable Administrator for the City of Chicago's Office of Cable Communications, where she established the Chicago Cable Commission, the City's regulatory body.

In 1980, Richardson received her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Richardson attended Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan for high school, and in 1976 received her B.A. degree in Theater Arts and American Studies from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she graduated magna cum laude. During her junior year at Brandeis University, Richardson benefited from the opportunity to serve as a visiting student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. It was also during her studies at Brandeis University that Richardson first experienced the power of oral history, while conducting independent research on the Harlem Renaissance and poet and author Langston Hughes that culminated in her senior honors thesis "It's all i got: Langston Hughes's reconciliation of black and American identities".

Julieanna L. Richardson (born June 10, 1954) is an American Harvard-trained lawyer and the founder and executive director of "The HistoryMakers", a national, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution based in Chicago, Illinois, committed to preserving, developing, and providing easy access to an internationally recognized archival collection of thousands of African-American video oral histories. With more than 2,000 life oral history interviews with well-known and unsung African Americans, The HistoryMakers is the nation's largest African-American oral history collection of its kind. Before founding The HistoryMakers in 1999, Richardson was a successful cable television executive and corporate lawyer. She was the founder and CEO of both SCTN Teleproductions, which served as the local production arm for C-SPAN, and Shop Chicago Inc., which set standards for regional TV home-shopping ventures and received international attention with its combination of home shopping and infomercial formats. Richardson resides in Chicago.

Among the organization's many achievements under Richardson's leadership are the production of an educational video, CD-ROM and curriculum guide, called Pioneers in the Struggle: A History of African Americans in the Illinois General Assembly, 1877-2001, which was distributed to schools, grades 8–12, across the state of Illinois, winning a $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to interview 180 African-American scientists, and being awarded an $800,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to run a fellowship program focusing on increasing diversity in the archival profession.