Join us in New Orleans this October as NPN’s in-person conference returns!
October 6–9, 2025
In-person
The Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter
New Orleans, LA (conference rate: $220/night)
Tickets available now
$250-$500 / Register at Eventbrite
“You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”
As we kick off NPN’s 40th anniversary, we gather together to reaffirm the power of art and culture in social movements, meaning-making, civic engagement, and liberation. Our conference theme – Stormshaping: Adaptation, Resistance, Reimagination – is a call to action in tumultuous times, to not simply weather the storms but to reshape our world through collective strength, imagination, and solidarity.
NPN’s convening is a space for exchange, learning, and practice at the intersection of art, culture, justice, and power-building. It is an opportunity to turn toward each other in the face of systems designed to divide and destabilize, and to build connection, capacity, strategy, and care.
With the conference taking place alongside the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it will also connect attendees with the complex and vibrant histories and cultures of New Orleans and the Gulf South.
All are welcome!
Read more about our Stormshaping theme from our April 2025 gathering in Houston.
Schedule At-A-Glance
Monday, October 6
- 3–6 pm: NPN National Partner meeting & happy hour (open to NPN National Partners only)
- 1:30–4 pm: Pre-conference tour: Botanica: Gardens, Landscapes, and Plant Medicines in South Louisiana, an NPN-supported exhibition, guided by co-curator Monique Verdin (separate registration required)
- 6–8 pm: Conference opening event: Reception at Ashé Cultural Arts Center, with exhibitions commemorating the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
Tuesday, October 7
- Opening assembly: “Take Me To The River,” guided by Houma Nation artists Monique Verdin and Hali Dardar, and with Bvlbancha Public Access
- Plenary: “The Future of Artist Mobility”
- Breakout sessions: Cultural Movement Assembly, case studies, roundtables, and more
- Affinity groups and Pláticas / open space
- Evening activities: Choose from arts events, dine-arounds, and excursions, including Mondo Bizarro Presents — live excerpts of new performance work by NPN-supported artists, at Catapult Theater, a gathering place for experimentation and creative collision
Wednesday, October 8
- Plenary: “You are Not Alone: Safety & Solidarity”
- Breakout sessions: Cultural Movement Assembly, Artists U, case studies, roundtables, and more
- Affinity groups and Pláticas / open space
- Evening activities: Choose from arts events, dine-arounds, and excursions, including Mondo Bizarro Presents — live excerpts of new performance work by NPN-supported artists, at Catapult Theater, a gathering place for experimentation and creative collision
Thursday, October 9
- Breakout sessions: Cultural Movement Assembly, Artists U, case studies, roundtables, and more
- Affinity groups and Pláticas / open space
- Closing Assembly: “Onward: Shaping the Storm Together”
- Closing night party and dance-off
Engage, Build, Deepen, and Connect
Engage with artists and their work through performances, workshops, visual art, and artist talks, both on-site and at neighborhood venues around New Orleans. Our off-site partners for artistic programming include Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Mondo Bizarro’s Catapult, and more.
Build skills, develop strategies, and share models and methodologies in a format that honors community-centered practices, encourages honest reflection, and embraces complexity.
Deepen your circles of community, solidarity, and support through affinity groups (including Trans/Nonbinary Artists, Arts Administrators of Color, and others), open space for self-organized topics, social gatherings that offer shared experience, and sessions that center collective care.
Connect to the culture of the region. New Orleans is Bvlbancha — “Land of Many Tongues” — and Indigenous community members and local culture bearers will guide our grounding in New Orleans. The gathering will also share and explore what it is to be rooted in the South, how Southern communities of color shape national strategies, and ways artists and culture workers are leading social change in the region.
“The energy and spirit of NPN’s conference is so special — it’s a mix of professionalism with informality that makes space for joy and being challenged and real talk. I left with more energy than I started, and that is so rare for a conference!”
– Past attendee
Sessions
NPN brings artists, cultural workers, activists, funders, and others into community with each other, challenging traditional hierarchies and building connection, trust, and accountability together.
The future of artist mobility
In today’s world — shaped by political upheaval, attacks on human rights, rising costs of living and doing business, decreased funding, and environmental disasters — artist mobility feels increasingly untenable. NPN is partnering with the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) to ask: What else is possible? Guided by DS4SI’s Ideas, Arrangements, and Effects framework, DS4SI will host a visioning session to reimagine what artist mobility could look like in this shifting landscape.
Artist-to-artist: making sustainable lives
How do we build lives as artists that are balanced, productive, and sustainable? In partnership with Artists U, we will host a series of workshop conversations throughout the conference addressing these questions. Since 2006, Artists U has been organizing to change the working conditions of artists through a process that is community-driven, skills-based instead of needs-based, and grounded in “slow organizing” that makes room for reflection and connection.
Cultural Movement Assembly
NPN’s conference brings together a confluence of the arts and social justice culture sectors, and at a time when there are so many fronts that pull our attention, we need to find ways to ground ourselves. Movement Assemblies have been used globally as a tool for decades, and NPN is partnering with Project South to lead this assembly, designed to develop a shared understanding of the problems we face, generate intersected solutions, and commit to action.
You Are Not Alone: Safety & Solidarity
Around the world and throughout history, the arts are among the first targets of authoritarianism. Dissent calls on us to not only reaffirm the vital role of artists as disruptors and risk-takers, but to build and invest in safety and solidarity for artists and cultural spaces that speak truth to power. As The Theater Offensive offered in its rules for fellowship in this era: “No blame. No hatred. Love. Unity. Liberation. Abundance.” Keynote conversation with Giselle Byrd, The Theater Offensive; and Julie Trébault, Artists at Risk Connection.
And more!
- The Land is the Mother: Rural Medicine of South Mississippi
- Survival Routes: Touring Trans Performance as a Map of Solidarity
- Soñar es Luchar: On the Radical Possibility of Collective Dreaming
- Centering Palestine: Embodied Practices of Healing, Resistance, and Freedom Amidst Genocide
- Activating the Decolonization Rider
- We Are Essential: Performance of Participatory Research for Racial Justice & Healing
- Participatory Art: Seed Syllables in Practice
- New Tools for New Terrain: Supporting Artists at the Intersections
Affinity Groups and Pláticas
NPN’s conference will include several affinity spaces for attendees to gather in community, including:
Affinity Space for Artists & Arts Administrators of Color
Join the Arts Administrators of Color Network for an interactive affinity space centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and global majority-identifying artists and arts administrators. This session offers a space to connect, reflect, and recharge alongside peers with shared lived experiences in the arts and culture sector.
Through peer sharing, community-building activities, and open dialogue, we’ll hold space to process our leadership journeys, name current challenges and needs, celebrate our wins, and explore how we can continue to support one another beyond this session. You’ll also have an opportunity to engage with AAC’s national network and share feedback to help shape the resources and programming designed to support your work and well-being.
Whether you’re new to AAC or a longtime community member, come as you are — we’re excited to be in community with you as part of this year’s NPN Conference experience.
“This area would contain a quote if we want to feature a person talking about this Affinity Space.”
Affinity Space for Trans Persons
A welcoming environment for trans attendees to connect, reflect on current challenges, celebrate resilience, and build solidarity amid an evolving social and political landscape.
Past Conference Highlights
A Dialectic for Our Times
adrienne maree brown, kai barrow, and Charlene A. Carruthers discuss how abolition, justice, and liberation runs through their works.
How We Gather
Indigenous voices provide essential principles for decolonizing and indigenizing our field.
Keynote: Mel Chin
Mel Chin shares how art can address social and environmental challenges, from toxic landfills to lead contamination, to create works that provoke awareness and responsibility.
“The survival of my own ideas may not be as important as a condition I might create for others’ ideas to be realized.”
Logistics & FAQs
When:
Monday, October 6th – Thursday, October 9th, 2025
Where:
New Orleans, Louisiana, also called Bvlbancha, a Choctaw word that means the Land of Many Tongues.
Hotel:
Our conference site is The Royal Sonesta, a historic hotel in the heart of the French Quarter, with rooms at $220/night (available October 5-11). Reservation deadline for room rate guarantee: Friday, August 29.
“NPN is just a whole different animal than other performance conferences, and one at which the welcoming of truth is palpable.”
– Past attendee
Land Acknowledgment
NPN is headquartered in Bvlbancha, the Choctaw name for New Orleans, meaning the Land of Many Tongues. New Orleans is on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Caddo, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Houma, Ishak, Natchez, and Tunica peoples, and the petites nations. We also recognize the Alabama, Biloxi, Koasati, and Ofo peoples, and others who were forced into Louisiana from their ancestral lands. We aim to honor these communities, past, present, and future.