Ana Levy-Lyons

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons is Acting Associate Minister at All Souls. She comes to us from Chicago where she most recently served as Minister of two congregations: the Beverly Unitarian Church in Chicago and the UU Community Church in Park Forest, Illinois.

Ana holds a B.A. in Music from Brown University and an M.Div. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She won the Borden Sermon Award from the UUA in 2006, and her sermon “Getting Real About Food” was published in Criterion, Vol. 45. More recently, she won the 2009 Jerry Davidoff Sermon Contest with her sermon, “Hear, O Unitarian Universalists!”

Ana grew up in Tenafly, NJ. After college, she moved to Seattle and then San Francisco. She started a web design business and worked for a series of dot com companies as an account manager in online advertising. Her clients were Fortune 500 companies and she quickly learned about the corporate media world, about the secrets of advertising, and about the religion of technology.

Simultaneously, Ana was pursuing a career much closer to her heart: writing and performing music. She spent five years as a singer/songwriter and recorded an album called “Hunger.” Her music website is still online at www.anaporter.com. She was Winner of the International SIBL Songwriting Competition in 2002 for her song “Hunger” and her songwriting received a rave review in Billboard.

Looking to expand her ministry beyond music, Ana began a graduate program at The Divnity School in 2003. There she discovered a “fit” with Unitarian Universalism and began her preparation for UU ministry. After a two-year internship at the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale, Illinois, she served as Consulting and then Assistant Minister at Unity Temple UU Congregation in Oak Park, and then flew solo with the two small congregations mentioned above.

Ana lives with her loving husband, Jeff, and loving dog, Yofi. Jeff’s son, Alex, is a freshman this year at American University.