The Team
Meet the team for Unboxing Queer History Season Two!
Unboxing Queer History Season Two was co-created by Erin Bell and Jen Dentel; produced by Akaelah Flotho, Anna Mason, Quinn Rose, Hannah Viti, and Chijioke Williams; and edited by Bill Healy and Mara Lazer. Artwork by Mere Montgomery and Music by Mara Lazer.
Major funding for this season of Unboxing Queer History is provided by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, with additional meaningful funding from supporters of Gerber/Hart.
Producers
Akaelah Flotho (they/them/theirs) is a recent graduate of the University of Illinois
Chicago’s Museums and Exhibition MA program. Akaelah has completed internships at the GLBT Historical Society Museum, Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Akaelah founded the Lavender Noire Project, a grassroots project collecting and preserving the oral histories of Black Queer individuals in the Chicago area.
Anna Mason (Senior Producer) is a Chicago Public Library associate and public media producer who focuses on local history and archive media. Anna's work has been featured on WBEZ radio, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs Newsletter, and the Chicago History Museum's event series.
Quinn Rose is a digital librarian with a passion for queer history, theater, digital humanities, and anything that can combine all three. Before pursuing libraries full-time, she was a freelance educational podcast producer and hosted shows about theater and art history. They now spend their time working in metadata, volunteering at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, and managing two black cats.
Hannah Viti is a Chicago-born DJ (known as VITIGRRL), sound artist, and sonic historian guided by a deep reverence for archival sound and the histories embedded within it. Her sets pulse with feeling—basslines that groove, vocals that call and respond, and rhythms that carry us across time.
She has carved a distinct space in the scene, holding residencies at the award-winning queer dance party Slo’ Mo and the legendary Good Girls DJ collective. She is also the founder of I-94, a mix series and event platform amplifying the next generation of DJs from Chicago and Detroit.
A committed sonic storyteller, Viti is an experienced podcast producer and oral historian, using sound as a tool for preservation and transformation. With experience producing narrative-driven podcasts, she specializes in capturing the richness of untold stories, particularly those rooted in queer and underground histories. After helping shape Unboxing Queer History’s first season, she is thrilled to return as a producer for Season 2 with Gerber Hart Library & Archives, continuing to uncover and amplify the voices that have shaped LGBTQ+ culture.
A Chicago native, Chijioke Williams is a sound designer, producer, and voiceover artist who loves combining her experience as a community activist with her technical skills as a storyteller. Her goal is always to add depth and meaning to every story she touches. Recently, she was the Associate Producer of "Division Street Revisited", and she is currently in the process of creating the fiction podcast “Between Heartbeats.”
Editors
Bill Healy is an award-winning investigative journalist. He has produced two podcasts with the Invisible Institute in Chicago: “You Didn’t See Nothin” and “Somebody”.
“You Didn’t See Nothin” won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting, Peabody Award, Third Coast Award, National Magazine Award and IDA Award. “Somebody” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting, and won a Third Coast Award, National Magazine Award, IDA Award, Scripps Howard Award and Headliner Award.
For many years Bill edited StoryCorps for Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ, where he also supported the Special Projects and Investigations Desk, crafting radio and multimedia series on the foster care system, race, drugs, and incarceration. Over the course of his career Bill has worked on stories with NPR, the BBC and “This American Life”.
Mara Lazer is a Third Coast award-winning audio producer focusing on social justice, policy advocacy, community building and queer history.
Co-Creators
Erin Bell (she/her) is an information science professional with over 7 years of service in the field. She is the Operations Director at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, after many years of volunteering. Erin is dedicated to accessible library service and passionate about archival preservation. She is a co-creator of the Gerber/Hart’s podcast Unboxing Queer History. Her article “Developing a Podcast to Share LGBTQ+ History” was published in the January/February 2022 issue of Archival Outlook, the official journal of the Society of American Archivists.
Jen Dentel (she/her) is the Community Outreach & Strategic Partnerships manager at Gerber/Hart Library & Archives where she has volunteered since 2014. Jen manages Gerber/Hart’s community programming and social media and helped co-create Gerber/Hart's podcast Unboxing Queer History. She has co-curated several exhibits at Gerber/Hart, including exhibits on pre-Stonewall activism, the history of drag, and lesbians and feminism in the 1970s and 80s. Jen is a fan of all things smut and pulp and her independent research on Chicago pulp author and activist Valerie Taylor was published in Queer Between the Covers from University of London Press.