Dan Lurie was a senior fellow and director of New America Chicago. A Chicago native, Lurie is a community development expert with extensive experience in local, state and federal government to advance social justice. His work has focused on the development of innovative policy approaches to address fundamental social challenges, including how systems—from arts to transportation to technology to housing to public health to economic development—intersect to shape community and how new coalitions can support that work.
Before joining New America, Lurie served in the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2016, most recently as deputy director for policy for former Vice President Biden where he led the Vice President's transportation, housing, community development, distressed communities, infrastructure, rural, and place-based agenda. Prior to that he was senior advisor to the chairman and director of strategic partnerships at the National Endowment for the Arts, a new position where he crafted a federal government-wide arts-driven community development policy agenda across multiple federal agencies and linked that agenda through new partnerships with state and local governments and philanthropies. Prior to NEA, Lurie was senior advisor to Deputy Secretary Ron Sims at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he helped launch the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and oversaw day-to-day management of the federal governments' principal community development agency.
Lurie began his career in Chicago as an antirust attorney and then served as deputy chief of staff at the Chicago Transit Board of the Chicago Transit Authority. He was an early part of then-Illinois State Senator Obama's 2003-4 campaign for U.S. Senate.
Lurie has a B.A. in American history from the of the University of Michigan, and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.