List of Famous people born in Wisconsin, United States of America

Alfred Davis Lunt Jr. was an American stage director and actor who had a long-time professional partnership with his wife, actress Lynn Fontanne. Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was named for them. Lunt was one of 20th century Broadway's leading male stars.

Jim Rygiel is a visual effects supervisor. He has worked on major feature films since 1984, including The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and Godzilla. He now works at FuseFX visual effects studio.

Ronald R. Breaker, Ph.D. is the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. He earned his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Purdue University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute under the supervision of Gerald Joyce. While at Scripps, he isolated the first DNA enzyme (deoxyribozyme). He then began his independent career at Yale University. Among his major accomplishments is the discovery of riboswitches. His current research is focused on understanding advanced functions of nucleic acids, including the discovery and analysis of riboswitches and ribozymes. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator since 2005.

Ric Waite was an American cinematographer whose numerous film and television credits included Red Dawn, Footloose, 48 Hrs., and The Long Riders. Waite received four Emmy nominations during his career. He won his only Emmy for his work on the 1976 television miniseries Captains and the Kings.

Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text “Convex Analysis” (1970), which has been cited more than 27000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger was an American statesman and career diplomat, who served briefly as the Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush. Previously, he had served in lesser capacities under Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and as Deputy Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush. Eagleburger is the only career Foreign Service Officer to have served as Secretary of State.

Richard Eldridge Maltby Jr. is an American theatre director and producer, lyricist, and screenwriter. He conceived and directed the only two musical revues to win the Tony Award for Best Musical: Ain't Misbehavin' and Fosse.

Richard H. Scheller is the former Chief Science Officer & Head of Therapeutics at 23andMe and the former Executive Vice President of Research and Early Development at Genentech. He was a Professor at Stanford University from 1982 to 2001 before joining Genentech. He has been awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1989, the W. Alden Spencer Award in 1993 and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology in 1997, won the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Thomas C. Südhof and James E. Rothman, and won the 2013 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Thomas Sudhof. He was also given the Life Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tommy George Thompson is an American Republican politician and the current President of the University of Wisconsin System, serving on an interim basis since July 1, 2020. He previously served as the 42nd Governor of Wisconsin and was the 19th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, in the cabinet of U.S. President George W. Bush.