Throughout our research on Performing City Resilience in New Orleans, we have been in conversation with individuals and with organisations that engage strategically with arts, hazard mitigation, and emergency planning in the city. Such conversation is critical to our research in New Orleans, and in those cities internationally where we are ‘outsider’ researchers and do not live in places that we study.
In our March 2025 visit to New Orleans, we focused both on re-connecting with existing contacts and extending our network in the city by looking at existing and new ways in which our work may be useful to future arts and “resilience” strategies in the city, whether separately or in combination. In this vein, we held a series of meetings/workshops with:
- colleagues from departments across City Hall to explore our research on “rethinking resilience” as it relates to climate crisis, hazard mitigation, housing, and sustainability;
- a strategic consulting firm for purpose-driven organisations in the city to workshop ways of networking their projects together (to reveal the importance of the “spaces in-between”), means of understanding their work in relation to the cultural imaginary of New Orleans, and ethical processes of engagement with arts and cultural stakeholders;
- Arts New Orleans (ANO) to introduce new processes of team and individual reflection that help to find space to think strategically about the role and function of their work in the city, and from this means of identifying new strategic priorities (e.g. in funding distribution and fund raising).
Alongside these “set piece” events, we also held a number of more informal meetings to explore ways our research might be useful to new and emerging initiatives in the city, as well as making a number of site visits.
The Overflow: We Will Dream New Works Festival Kick-Off
As part of his visit, we were delighted to be invited to contribute to The Overflow, the opening event for the‘We Will Dream’ New Works Festival, at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice (ACC) on Bayou Road. We Will Dream is ‘the largest festival in the gulf coast region dedicated to uplifting new works by Black and African-descendant theatre makers’ and a critical platform for emerging work in the city. This year, the festival theme is ‘The Water Remembers’,
exploring the transformative power of water as a vessel of remembrance, connection, and cultural legacy. This theme is in alignment with the Katrina 20 commemoration taking place across New Orleans this year.
We have been in conversation with Lauren Turner Hines, Founder/Executive Director of ACC and No Dream Deferred since 2023, and we were honoured when Lauren invited us to contribute to the launch evening for the ACC New Works Festival – and we’re grateful to Lauren for being in conversation with us on stage for this event.
André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice (2025)
In this event, we looked back over our work in the city and ahead to our new book, Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life, which is out in the autumn with LSU Press. Our talk (available here) was followed by a panel presentation with key arts strategists in the city: Alana Harris (Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy), Shaddai Livingston (ASHE, Afro-Indigenous Society), Nick Slie (Mondo Bizarro), Lauren Turner Hines (Andre Cailloux Center), Joycelyn Reynolds (ANO), and chaired by Shani Peterson (The Black School).
See Folk Riot‘s review of the event here.
Art and Performance
East New Orleans Regional Library (2025)
Our trip followed soon after the Superbowl had been hosted in the city. While this posed challenges to the city, the Superbowl also led to the installation of compelling new murals. We are grateful to Arts New Orleans, which commissioned many of these works, for taking us on a tour of mural projects in the city: around the Superdome, close to the Aquarium, as part of Gentilly Resilience District, and in New Orleans East. Through this visit, we were struck by Arts Council New Orleans’ work with the Young Artist Movement (YAM) and the ways in which youth voices and artistry have been so critical to the generation of murals in the city.
Alongside murals, we were able to experience the extraordinary Super Sunday parade of Black Masking Indians through Central City. We watched Decompositions, a performance by Farm Arts Collective at Catapult (a performance centre and home to arts and cultural practitioners), we caught music at various venues, spent time at the new Broadside venue on the Lafitte Greenway, attended a basketball game, and we were invited to join a work in progress showing by Goat in the Road at BK House and Gardens in the French Quarter. Even at the point that we have a book coming out on that investigates performances of New Orleans as means to reflecting on the city, we continue to be struck by the scale, breadth, forms, and the significance of performance in New Orleans.
