Victoria Lautman is a Chicago broadcast journalist and writer with a specialty in arts, culture, and the humanities.

Lautman has an M.A. in Art History from George Washington University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Art History from the University of New Mexico. She attended Merton College at Oxford University for archaeological field training, and spent one summer on a Bronze Age excavation in the Scottish Hebrides. Following graduate school, she worked for four years at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the...

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In 2004, she created Chicago's premier author-interview series, Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman, a free, hour-long interview taped each month before a live audience that was broadcast for six years. Hosted by the Chicago Public Library at the Harold Washington Library Center, the series was heard on 98.7WFMT radio. Lautman hosted and produced WOTR, which drew dozens of renowned authors to Chicago, including Junot Diaz

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience...

, Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones

Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. His 2003 novel The Known World received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.-Biography:...

, Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout is an American author of fiction.She was born in Portland, Maine, and was raised in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. After graduating from Bates College, she spent a year in Oxford, England, followed by studies at law school for another year...

, Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, is an author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American heritage. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...

, Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt

Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, best known as the author of Angela’s Ashes, an award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood....

, Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is an American writer, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.-Early life and education:...

, Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Xon Burroughs is an American writer known for his New York Times bestselling memoir Running with Scissors .- Life :...

, Edwidge Danticat, Peter Carey, Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a political activist, public speaker and writing teacher. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical...

, Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

, Russell Banks

Russell Banks

Russell Banks is an American writer of fiction and poetry.- Biography :Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is also...

, Richard Price

Richard Price

Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...

, and Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories .-Life:Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky...

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Prior to inaugurating this series, Lautman was a featured host and contributor on Chicago Public Radio for two decades. Beginning as a free-lance arts reviewer 1984, she eventually hosted and co-produced her own arts and culture magazine program, "Artistic License", which aired weekly for eight years. Lautman then joined the daily magazine show, "848", and became a regular interviewer and contributor on a wide variety of subjects, including not only arts and culture but also medicine, education, and politics. Her humorous essays on day-to-day life were a regular feature of the program. She continues to be a featured presenter for the Chicago Humanities Festival, interviewing Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...

, Lady Antonia Fraser, Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...

, Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh , is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.-Life:Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St...

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As a print journalist, Victoria Lautman has been Chicago Editor for magazines such as Metropolitan Home, Art+Auction

Art & Auction

Art+Auction is a monthly art magazine published in New York City by Louise Blouin Media. The magazine is published 12 times per year; it includes special features & art news stories, art & collector profiles, reviews & auction reports, calendar of art events, art market trends & insider market...

, Architectural Record, and House & Garden, and a contributing editor for Chicago magazine. She’s also been a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune, and has written for many other magazines and newspapers, including the Indian editions of Vogue and GQ. Her non-fiction book, The New Tattoo, was first published in 1994. She is a periodic blogger for The Huffington Post.

On television, Lautman has appeared on Chicago stations WTTW, WBBM and WMAQ, as a segment host and contributor.