Individual | Inducted 2025 | Posthumous Induction
Artist, playwright, and activist James Hubert “Jim” Rinnert was the founding board president of the Biscotto/Miller Fund, created in 1985 to provide direct financial assistance to Chicagoland theatre artists impacted by HIV/AIDS. The fund was named in memory of Rinnert’s lover, Chicago theatre stage manager Tom Biscotto, and Rinnert’s friend, actor J. Pat Miller, following their deaths from AIDS-related complications. Rinnert was part of the committee that organized and produced “Arts Against AIDS,” a May 13, 1985, benefit variety show that raised some $10,000 for the Biscotto-Miller Fund. In 1987, Rinnert was instrumental in the creation of Season of Concern Chicago, the nonprofit agency that now manages the Biscotto/Miller Fund, and later served as SOC’s board president. Originally formed to assist people with AIDS-related illnesses, SOC today provides financial assistance to Chicagoland theater practitioners impacted by illness, injury, or circumstance that prevents them from working as well as to Chicago-area HIV/AIDS service organizations.
Born in Flora, Illinois, in 1944, Rinnert came to Chicago in the early 1970s after graduating from Eastern Illinois University and following a stint in the U.S. Army serving as a personnel specialist during the Vietnam War. An accomplished visual artist, he joined the staff of In These Times, a Chicago-based, nationally circulated politically progressive magazine of news and opinion, in 1976, and served as its art director for three decades in addition to contributing articles on LGBT rights issues.
Before joining the staff of In These Times, as well as throughout his tenure there, Rinnert was involved in Chicago’s grassroots theatre scene throughout the 1970s. His 1980 multimedia play “The Artaud Project,” which starred J. Pat Miller as avant-garde French theatre and cinema artist Antonin Artaud, won a special Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) Award. Chicago Tribune theatre critic Richard Christiansen called the production “a compulsively watchable work that offers interested theater audiences the opportunity to experience a genuinely experimental piece.”
Rinnert passed away in 2025. At the time of his death he was living in New Carlisle, Indiana, with his husband, retired Lyric Opera director of finance Brent Fisher.