Dann Gire

Dann Gire serves as the president and founding director of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He has worked at the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago as a government reporter, crime reporter, Metro reporter (assigned to the Cook County Criminal Courts), and film critic on the Features staff. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Chicago Headline Club, the local chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists. In 2013, he was named "Friend of Scholastic Journalism" by both the Illinois Journalism Education Association and the national Journalism Education Association. Gire has won the prestigious Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in Arts Criticism eight times. He has also won awards from the Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the Associated Press, and other journalism organizations. Gire taught journalism classes in the Communications Department at Aurora University (Illinois) 2008-2010. From 1984 to 2006, Gire served as an adjunct faculty member at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Ill., teaching classes in drama, novels & short stories, film & literature, introductory journalism, mass communications and feature writing. From 2000 to 2006, he also served as the faculty adviser to the Harbinger newspaper at Harper College. He was fired from both positions after a dispute with a Harper vice-president over censorship issues at the paper. He subsequently gave testimony for the Higher Education committees of the Illinois Senate and Illinois House to promote passage of the Illinois College Campus Press Act that would make political firings of college newspaper staffs and faculty advisers illegal. The act became law on June 1, 2008. Gire teamed up in 2006 with James Bond 007 novelist Raymond Benson to create "Dann and Raymond's Movie Club," a popular, traveling monthly film lecture/discussion series in Chicago's Northwest suburbs. Gire is a graduate of both Charleston (Ill.) High School and Eastern Illinois University where he earned BA and MA degrees in Speech-Communications. Gire is married to the former Peggy Burke, also a graduate of Charleston High School and EIU, and the daughter of the late Circuit Judge Thomas and Elaine Burke. They have two daughters: Lauren Elaine Taylor, who will be playing Marlene Dietrich in Barry Manilow's new musical "Harmony" in Los Angeles: and Morgan Gire, a Chicago stage manager and stage actress.