John Lanzendorf
John J. Lanzendorf is an American hairstylist who amassed one of the world's largest collections of dinosaur-themed artwork. The collection is now owned by the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
Lanzendorf lives in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. During the 1970s and 1980s, he earned a reputation as one of the favorite hairstylists of Chicago's socialites. He worked with the fashion photographer Victor Skrebneski and had his own studio with partner Hank Blankenship on Chicago's Oak Street.
Lanzendorf had begun collecting dinosaur-related items as a child, when he found a small plastic dinosaur toy in a cereal box. After recovering from cancer in the early 1990s, he started purchasing sculptures, paintings, and drawings from some of the best-known paleoartists, such as James Gurney, John Gurche, and Michael Skrepnick. He also acquired drawings from the University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who became a close friend. By 2000, he owned about 500 pieces, which he kept in his one-bedroom apartment.
In 2000, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History displayed about seventy of Lanzendorf's Tyrannosaurus sculptures and paintings to complement the grand opening of their Sue the Tyrannosaurus exhibit. That same year, a coffee table book about Lazendorf's collection, Dinosaur Imagery, was released by Academic Press. The book included a foreword by paleontologist Philip J. Currie and commentaries on the collection from other dinosaur researchers.
Lanzendorf sold his dinosaur collection to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis in 2001. He then redecorated his apartment with Asian art. Lanzendorf told an interviewer that he developed an interest in Asian artifacts after visiting fossil sites in Mongolia. He continues to support dinosaur artists with the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize, awarded through the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
