BOB CHITESTER
Executive Producer

Bob Chitester is founder and president of Free To Choose Network and its production and educational initiatives Free To Choose Media and izzit.org.  With more than 40 years of experience creating programs and series for public television and as president of the Erie public television station WQLN, Bob Chitester continues to be creatively involved in the creation of programs and series for Free To Choose Media and izzit.org. 

In partnership with his colleague Tom Skinner (senior executive producer at Free To Choose Media) Bob has served as executive producer for The Power of Choice: the Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman (on PBS), The Ultimate Resource (American Public Television), The Power of the Poor (PBS), Globalization at the Crossroads with Hernando de Soto, and Turmoil and Triumph: The George Shultz Years, a three-part documentary series for PBS.

In 1980 Bob Chitester brought Milton Friedman to public television and was responsible as executive producer for Friedman’s landmark PBS series Free To Choose and the best-selling book that emanated from the series. Free or Equal, hosted by Swedish author Johan Norberg, is his latest production — re-examining the impact of Free To Choose more than thirty years later.

Bob Chitester holds BA and MA degrees from The University of Michigan and has received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Allegheny College.

On the personal level, he pursues physical fitness (running, swimming and biking), indulges in wood and clay sculpture, reads poetry publicly, is a hunter and cuts several cord of fire wood each year, when he is not flying about in airplanes as part of his responsibilities at Free To Choose Network.  Bob and his wife, Carol, have 4 children and 8 grandchildren, one of whom they are raising in their home.

DENNIS DEAL
Producer / Writer

Dennis Deal is a writer, musician, composer and director who works in legitimate theater, television and corporate communications. He’s currently writing and directing this video teaching unit for izzit.org, hosted by Scott Bakula (Enterprise, Quantum Leap).

Deal contributed to several of Bob Chitester’s projects, beginning with the television show Damn Right, supplying comedy segments and theme music, sung by his a’capella group, The Accidentals (www.theaccidentals.com), winners of the National Harmony Sweepstakes and numerous Manhattan Concert and Cabaret awards. For the past decade they have been a December attraction at the World Financial Center’s Wintergarden.

Early in his career Dennis arranged over twenty albums of unpublished and/or unrecorded theater music (Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein, etc.) for Ben Bagley’s Revisited Collection, featuring such notables as Alan Arkin, Kaye Ballard, Nell Carter, Anthony Perkins, Lynn Redgrave and Katharine Hepburn. 

Simultaneously, he was writing live “industrial shows” for Mobil, Kinney Shoes and John Deere, to name a few. In the theatrical world, Deal is best known for his 50’s musical pastiche, Nite Club Confidential, which he wrote and directed Off-Broadway, on London’s West End and in Los Angeles.