Jan Lisa Huttner

Jan Lisa Huttner is an award-winning arts critic and feminist activist. Huttner is the President and Editor-in-Chief of FF2 Media, LLC (ff2media.com), a website dedicated to expanding cultural awareness of women artists. Jan’s FF2 team covers women working in the Applied Arts, Performance Arts, Literary Arts and Visual Arts, providing features, interviews, and reviews for the twenty-first-century reader. Huttner is also the founder of the SWAN concept (Support Women Artist Now) which began in 2004 as an AAUW-Illinois project called WITASWAN (Women in the Audience Supporting Women Artist Now). In 2008, Jan joined forces with Martha Richards of WomenArts (aka the Fund for Women Artists) to co-found International SWAN Day celebrated annually on the last Saturday of March. Since Ms. Richards’s retirement from WomenArts in 2020, Huttner has moved the SWAN agenda into a third phase now called International SWANs. Huttner’s proudest accomplishment to date is to have served as one of two credited story consultants (along with Alisa Solomon, the author of "Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof") for Max Lewkowicz’s award-winning and highly-acclaimed documentary film, "Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles." Click this link to find out more about thefiddlerfilm.com. A bona fide expert on "Fiddler on the Roof," Huttner has been publishing and posting articles since 2003. Her first Fiddler book—"Tevye's Daughters: No Laughing Matter"—provides an in-depth analysis of where Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories (the beloved source material for "Fiddler on the Roof") fit in the context of other father/daughter stories, most especially the television series Downtown Abbey, the musical "First Impressions" and the novel "Pride and Prejudice, as well as the story of the Daughters of Zelophehad in the Bible’s Book of Numbers. Her second Fiddler book—"Diamond Fiddler: New Traditions for a New Millennium"—is a comprehensive examination of all things Fiddler, based on meticulous textual analysis of the transformation of Sholem Aleichem’s eight Tevye stories (typically published today in a collection called "Tevye the Dairyman") into the brilliant Jerome Robbins diamond, "Fiddler on the Roof." This second Fiddler book—originally called "Diamond Fiddler: Laden with Happiness & Tears"—was updated in 2018 with new content as well as a highly-detailed contextual index. In addition to her two Fiddler books, Huttner is also the author of "Penny’s Picks: 50 Movies by Women Filmmakers," which contains reviews written between 2002 and 2011, as well as background information on the origins of International SWAN Day. Read more about Jan on her Wikipedia page: www.wikipedia.org/Jan_Lisa_Huttner