Brett Anderson is a food correspondent for The New York Times joining in July 2019 after serving as restaurant critic and features writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans from 2000 to 2019. Winner of 3 James Beard Awards, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Times Picayune’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2013, his groundbreaking reporting on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry garnered numerous accolades, including Eater’s Reporter of the Year in 2017. In 2010, his team was awarded the Scripps Howard Edward J Meeman Award for environmental reporting for his work covering the BP oil spill. In 2015, he received the Excellence in Journalism Award from the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation for “Louisiana Loses Its Boot,” a longform story about the state’s disappearing coastline. His work has appeared in newyorker.com, Travel & Leisure, Oxford American, Gourmet and the Washington Post.
Brett Anderson
Steven Bingler is the founder and CEO of Concordia, a community centered engagement, planning and architectural co-design studio in New Orleans. Concordia, from the Latin word meaning agreement between people and harmony among things, is also the firm’s one-word mission statement.
Steven Bingler
Born in Nashville but raised in St. Louis, MO, Rahn Broady considers himself a guide and fellow lifelong learner about nature and science and believes that our students are the best ambassadors to their families and immediate communities. Rahn is also an obsessive home gardener, ice cream ingenue, and dancer in the street.
Rahn Broady
Bliss Broyard is the author of the bestselling story collection My Father, Dancing, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the memoir, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets, which was named best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and received the Louisiana Endowment for the Arts Humanist Book of the Year award.
Bliss Broyard
Donna Cavato served as the founding director of Edible Schoolyard NOLA, a signature program of FirstLine Schools, and the first affiliate of Alice Waters’ garden and kitchen classroom project in Berkeley. With the help of hundreds of eager students, parents and families, community volunteers, novice and expert gardeners, and chefs, the program has become a vital part of the New Orleans community. The program provides organically-grown food and hands-on gardening and culinary education to 2,500 students, delivering over 4,500 garden and culinary classes each year and hosting about 70 school and community events annually. The program aims to change the way school children eat, learn and live in New Orleans--by connecting children to the food they grow and eat, to the natural world, and to the larger community. After her tenure at ESY NOLA, Donna became the first Director of Culture and Wellness for FirstLine Schools.
Originally from Chicago, Donna came to New Orleans in 1999 with a background in Urban Planning and Public Policy and several years of experience in the nonprofit sector, where she was an advocate for residents of public housing, equal pay, and living wage campaigns, and also founded a small artisan business enterprise for women who were homeless.
Currently, Donna is the Chief Program Officer for Communities in Schools Gulf South and co-owner of The Kitchen Table Cafe with her husband, Chef Kevin Hackett, where they prepare dishes from scratch and from local sources, including their own garden in the Holy Cross neighborhood of New Orleans. Donna continues to have a keen interest in the therapeutic and healing value of gardening and is completing horticultural therapy courses through the Horticultural Therapy Institute.
Donna Cavato
A native New Orleanian, Gianna Chachere is the Founder/Executive Director of The New Quorum, an artist residency that brings musicians from around world to New Orleans for performance and collaboration with local artists. Previously she was the Producing Director of the Hamptons International Film Festival from 2006 to 2014. Gianna is the producer of Improv New Orleans: A Festival of Ideas.
Gianna Chachere
Randy Fertel holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University and is the author of A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation (Spring Journal Books, 2015), the inspiration for this conference. As a scholar, writer and philanthropist and founder of the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Dr. Fertel is dedicated to the arts, education, New Orleans, and the environment. He has a special interest in catalyzing initiatives from which new communities and new insights may emerge. This interdisciplinary conference, three years in the making, is such an initiative.
Randy Fertel
Jules Feiffer is an American legend, whom the Library of Congress has recognized for his "remarkable legacy" as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor. Feiffer’s Pulitzer-winning comic strip ran for forty-two years in the Village Voice and one hundred other papers. He is the author of a wide range of additional creative work, including the Obie Award-winning play Little Murders, the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge, and the Oscar-winning short animation, Munro. Other works include the plays Knock Knock (a Tony award nominee) and Grown-Ups; the novels Harry, the Rat with Women and Ackroyd; the screenplays Popeye and I Want to Go Home (winner of the best screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival); and the children’s books The Man in the Ceiling, Bark, George, and the illustrations for Which Puppy? by his daughter, Kate, and the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth.
Jules Feiffer
Guitarist/Composer, Jonathan Freilich is a Co-founder of the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars (NOKAS) and founder of Naked On The Floor (quintet) and The Naked Orchestra (18-24 piece orchestra) which play Freilich's original compositions exclusively and play regularly in New Orleans. Performing with New Orleans' greatest musicians including Kermit Ruffins, Michael Ward and The Reward, and Sun Ra trumpeter, Michael Ray, Freilich has appeared at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 24 times as well as headlining the Berlin Jazz Festival with NOKAS. He has appeared with Sam Rivers, Burton Greene, Marshall Allen, The Wild Magnolias and backed Robbie Robertson.
Jonathan Freilich
David Gamble is a multidisciplinary artist from London based in New Orleans. His body of work consists of paintings, works on paper, and photographs. Gamble worked as one of the foremost international editorial photographers for publications such as The Observer, the Independent, LIFE, Fortune, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, and more. Over his decades-long career, Gamble has photographed such illustrious figures as Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, several portraits of which reside in the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
David Gamble
WENDY A. GAUDIN is an essayist, a poet, an American historian, and the proud descendant of Louisiana Creoles who migrated to California. Her essay, “Beauty,” won the North American Review’s 2016 Torch Memorial Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Other recent publications appear in the Indiana Review, Puerto Del Sol, the Rappahannock Review, the New Orleans Review and About Place Journal. She lives in New Orleans and teaches at Xavier University of Louisiana.
Wendy Gaudin
An award-winning journalist and urbanist, Roberta Brandes Gratz has been observing and writing about cities—how they grow, fall apart, and recover—for more than 40 years. NYC-born and raised, Roberta has written five books on urban change. The last one was: “We’re Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City.”
Earlier books were: “The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,” “The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way,” “Cities Back From the Edge: New Life For Downtown,” and “A Frog, A Wooden House, A Stream and A Trail: Ten years of Community Revitalization in Central Europe.”
Her writing has also appeared in the Nation, New York Magazine, New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. She served on the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Sustainability Advisory Board for NYC under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
In 2004, Roberta, with author/urbanist Jane Jacobs, founded The Center for the Living City centerforthelivingcity.org to build on Jacobs’ groundbreaking work.
Roberta Gratz
A native of Boston and an avid music fan, Kunian began his long tenure (some might say too long…) as a late-night DJ on WWOZ-FM New Orleans, the community radio station in 1993. He has produced award-winning documentaries about James Booker, Earl King, the Dew Drop Inn, Guitar Slim, James Black, Chris Kenner, Michael Ward, Everette Maddox, and the history of Mardi Gras songs, distributed to over 200 stations nationwide. A writer for Offbeat, Gambit Weekly, Downbeat, Beat Street, Indy Magazine, The Oxford American, The Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame profiles books, and Louisiana Cultural Vistas, he is an oral historian and lecturer at the National Jazz Park, the International New Orleans Music Colloquium, The Ponderosa Stomp, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Alison Miner Heritage Stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the Satchmo Summerfest. After Hurricane Katrina, he received a grant from the GRAMMY Foundation to digitize and preserve part of his archive of oral histories and has digitized parts of the Louisiana State Museum collection including oral histories and radio broadcasts of the New Orleans Jazz Club.
David Kunian
Andrew Lam is a writer and an editor with the Pacific News Service, a short story writer, and, for 8 years, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” He co-founded New America Media, an association of over 2000 ethnic media organizations in America. Lam's first short story collection, “Birds of Paradise Lost” won a Gold Medal from UC Irvine for contributions to the humanities as well as a Pen/Josephine Miles Literary Award. His book of essays, "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" was listed as top 10 Indies of 2010 by Shelf Unbound Magazine. His book, "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" has recently won the Pen American “Beyond the Margins” Award and was short-listed for “Asian American Literature Award.”
Andrew Lam
Bryan C. Lee Jr. is the Design Director and a founder of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit collective based in New Orleans that tackles social justice projects through a community lens. Lee got his start in architecture at the New Orleans firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and worked as the Place+Civic design director for the Arts Council of New Orleans before starting Colloqate in 2017.
Bryan C. Lee, Jr.
Sue Mobley is a New Orleans based urbanist, organizer, and advocate. She serves as Director of Advocacy at Colloqate Design and Co-Director of the Paper Monuments, a public art and public history project that invites New Orleans residents to imagine new monuments for New Orleans. Sue was formerly Public Programs Manager at the Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane School of Architecture, where she combined public pedagogy projects, strategic collaborations between the academy, public, and non-profit sectors, and adapting social science research methods with architecture students.
Sue Mobley
Born and raised in New Orleans, Stanton Moore is an artist, teacher and performer especially connected to the city, its culture and collaborative spirit. In the early ‘90s, Moore helped found the New Orleans-based essential funk band Galactic who continue to amass a worldwide audience via recording and touring globally. Moore launched his solo career in 1998 and has 9 records under his own name with the most current being "With You In Mind: The Songs of Allen Toussaint." Throughout his 25 year career, Moore has played and or recorded with a diverse group of artists including Maceo Parker, Joss Stone, Irma Thomas, Leo Nocentelli and George Porter (of the Meters), Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine), Corrosion of Conformity, Donald Harrison Jr., Nicholas Payton, Trombone Shorty, Skerik, Charlie Hunter, Robert Walter, Will Bernard, Ivan Neville, Anders Osborne and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. He has also appeared numerous times on the Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O'Brien and Seth Meyers late night TV night shows.
Stanton Moore
Sandy Ha Nguyen founded Coastal Communities Consulting, Inc. (CCC) during the aftermath of the BP Oil/Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010 to provide disaster technical assistance to Louisiana southeast commercial fisherman, especially for limited English speaking Vietnamese fishermen. Prior to founding CCC, she was a consultant for the Louisiana Small Business Development Center (LASBDC) where she continued her lifelong passion of helping more than 1,500 families and businesses in rural communities across the state, particularly coastal entrepreneurs. She has worked with the commercial fishing industry since 1992 and possesses an intimate knowledge of the industry and the communities that sustain it.
Sandy Ha Nguyen
Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, studying the traditional uses for plants in Central and South America forests. He works closely with shamans, community leaders who practice traditional healing techniques using plants and animals, learned over uncounted generations. But when forests are disrupted (by illegal logging, for instance), that knowledge risks being lost. Plotkin's work helps to collect and share shamanic learning, with a twofold goal: to preserve the rainforest by showing its value as a source of yet-to-be-discovered pharmaceuticals. Plotkin pioneered his research working with the Trio Indians of southern Suriname, and has also worked with elder shamans from Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. He's the author of the best-selling book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. With his wife, Liliana Madrigal, he co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team, a group that helps indigenous people purchase and protect their sacred sites.
Mark Plotkin
Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence, was published in 2018. He is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times Bestsellers. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was named one of the ten best books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Pollan teaches writing in the English department at Harvard and at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he has been the John S. and James, L. Knight Professor of Journalism since 2003. Several of his books have been adapted for television: a series based on Cooked (2015) is streaming on Netflix and both The Botany of Desire and In Defense of Food premiered on PBS. In 2010 Time Magazine named Pollan one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Michael Pollan
Shannon Powell is a highly sought-after percussionist and bandleader who has achieved international acclaim for his commanding technique and style, rooted in the funky drumbeats of New Orleans. Mr. Powell has performed all over the world with notables in jazz. In his early career, Powell toured extensively with Harry Connick, Jr. and released two platinum albums with Connick including, “We Are in Love,” and “Blue Light Red Light.” He also recorded “Lofty’s Roach Souffle” with Connick. During subsequent years, Powell has toured with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marcus Roberts, Diana Krall, Dr. John, Earl King, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and John Scofield. Powell has also recorded with a long list of noteworthy artists, including Ellis Marsalis, Jason Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison, Irvin Mayfield, Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Considered a living legend in New Orleans music, Shannon Powell is heralded as “The King of Treme,” the neighborhood where he grew up in, which has given birth to countless musical inspirations and innovations.
Shannon Powell
Kristina Kay Robinson is a writer and artist born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Baffler, The Nation and Elle among other outlets. She is a 2019 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism and the current editor of Room 220, an online arts journal and program of Antenna Gallery in New Orleans.
Kristina Kay Robinson
Shirley Elizabeth Thompson
Michael Tisserand is a New Orleans-based author whose most recent book is Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White — the first full-length biography of cartoonist George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat. His other books include The Kingdom of Zydeco and Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember. Michael’s work has appeared in the Oxford American, The Nation, The Progressive, and on WBEZ-FM Chicago. The former editor of New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly, Michael’s eleven-part Katrina series “Submerged” was published in alternative newsweeklies across the country. He has appeared on “To the Point” and was a frequent guest on Philip Adams’ “Late Night Live,” and can be seen in the documentaries Dear Mr. Watterson and Zydeco Crossroads.
Michael Tisserand
Johnny Vidacovich is the most influential living drummer from the New Orleans scene — a quintessential Big Easy rhythm master whose grooves are inextricably connected to the raucous street beats of the second line. Over his storied career, the Crescent City native has provided that unmistakable, irrepressible propulsion behind iconic musical figures Professor Longhair, Johnny “Tan Canary” Adams, John Scofield, Mose Allison, James Booker, and Harry Connick, Jr. among dozens of others. He is a founding member of the exploratory jazz quintet Astral Project with saxophonist Tony Dagradi, pianist David Torkanowski, guitarist Steve Masakowski and bassist James Singleton. Forming in 1978 as regular performers at the Absinthe House on Bourbon Street, Astral Project earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the finest small groups on the scene, with each member nurturing separate careers as leaders and in-demand session musicians while maintaining the band as a homebase for over three decades.