Neighborhood Story Project

Following our mission of "Our Stories Told By Us," the Neighborhood Story Project creates strong creative partnerships that build on the art of storytelling, the ethics of knowledge-sharing, and joy of co-creativity. We work in many mediums~creative nonfiction, in-depth interviews, photography, installations, music, conversations, parades ~ to co-produce work that is profit-shared with our partners.

Since 2004, the Neighborhood Story Project has worked with public schools, grassroots organizations, community-based museums, and other important cultural institutions to create books, exhibits, events, and courses that explore how individual life histories and creative practices are connected to the broader cultural and historical dynamics of the city and the world. We believe in the power of cross-cultural conversations and co-creativity to build on the strengths of our communities, and have used our workshop to host live recordings of concerts, workshops, exhibits and conversations that emerge from the ethnographies that we have produced. We have sold over 50,000 copies of our books and profit-shared the proceeds. The books are frequently used in high school and college courses, and were recently recommended in the best books of the last 300 years.

This upcoming year, we are continuing to develop books, exhibits, and cross-cultural exchanges with many of our long term partners:

Continuing our work with the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, we are creating a book and exhibit called Botanica, which highlights the contributions of a multi-racial group of naturalists, herbalists, and gardeners in south Louisiana. For more info: https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/bccbotanica.html

We are developing a cultural exchange with art and filmmakers in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo with the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors, which will bring artwork to Congo and film to New Orleans.

Bringing together a wonderful group of scholars, musicians, artists, and healers, we will be redesigning our website to create an open-source curriculum on New Orleans for educators here in the city, as well as around the world.

Testimonials

Since their founding in 2004 The Neighborhood Story Project has used the art of collaborative ethnography to create a vast collection of community-based stories in south Louisiana and beyond. The organization, in partnership with the University of New Orleans, creates portraits of the region by working with their collaborators to move the contours, planes, and angles of a place out onto a cultural canvas. They layer creative nonfiction and in-depth interviews, artifacts, folk and fine art, photographs, and music, among other materials, to craft an immersive space for learning and examination. For many years, The Neighborhood Story Project has turned their books into exhibitions and programs where their audiences are not only observers, but participants, who are able to connect with the lives and narratives presented, and can come away with a sense of how life histories are seated in wider social and cultural contexts. The Neighborhood Story Project often revives and preserves histories which may have been overlooked by mainstream media, and of places that are otherwise at risk of disappearing. Their ethnographies form the basis for art, publications, and performances, creating a new historical record of a place. --Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday We Said Tomorrow

Firmly rooted in community and clearly aligned with NSP's longstanding credo: "Our Stories Told By Us," Le Kèr Creole is ethnography as it should be-by, with, and for the people. This is a generative rather than an extractive method. It is less about the production of academic knowledge or expertise, and more about what happens when we position and share Black history and culture as "an offering to the future" (p. 88). This is a timely and powerful gift-particularly as anthropology re-centers itself in the ongoing strike for freedom. --Rebecca Carter. Anthropology & Humanism

It is not your typical ethnography. Rather it evokes the emotional, multi-sensorial engagements of powerful persons and personalities, tensions and intentions, deeply felt. The many authors and contributors to Fire in the Hole have conveyed the spirit of creative culture-making. This is history as lived, and we are privileged to hear it from those who made it." --Henry Drewal, African Art historian in a review of Fire in the Hole