List of Famous people born in Illinois, United States of America
Janet Shearon
Capers Funnye
Capers C. Funnye Jr. is an African-American rabbi, who leads the 200-member Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Chicago, Illinois, assisted by rabbis Avraham Ben Israel and Joshua V. Salter.
Harold P. Boas
Harold P. Boas is an American mathematician.
Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
R. W. B. Lewis
Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
Jack Fisk
Jack Fisk is an American production designer and director.
Penny Pritzker
Penny Sue Pritzker is an American billionaire businesswoman, entrepreneur, and civic leader. President Barack Obama nominated Pritzker as United States Secretary of Commerce. After being confirmed by a Senate vote of 97–1, she became the 38th person to hold that position.
Cornelia Otis Skinner
Cornelia Otis Skinner was an American author and actress.
Eleanor J. Gibson
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff,” which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Brian Schlitter
Brian Patrick Schlitter is an American professional baseball relief pitcher in the Oakland Athletics organization. He has played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Chicago Cubs and Oakland Athletics, and in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) for the Saitama Seibu Lions.