May/June 2026 News
June 30, 2026 • 5 minute read
Your Mixed Metaphor Card This Month
“The Future is Now:
Vision Dreams for Arts Organizations”
Celebrating the power of dreaming as essential to transformation.
Use the following prompt to co-create a poem that brings the future to life in your senses.
What does the future you or your organization envision…
look like? sound like? smell like? taste like? feel like?
Voices from the Network
“The work is an archive of my communities, my journeys”
An Interview with Take Notice Fund Artist Melanie Greene
Melanie Greene is a movement-based artist from New Orleans, LA, who uses the concept of a time traveler named Sapphire to explore and celebrate Black women’s bodies. In this interview, part of NPN Take Notice Fund’s commitment to bring more visibility to Louisiana artists of color, Melanie talks to NPN about what led her to Sapphire, and how she layers her performances to connect with audiences from a variety of backgrounds.
“I was fascinated in what it means for Black women to see ourselves in the future and to see our survival, I started to look at Afrofuturism and to sort of dream and imagine, what if?”
Read the full interview on our Voices from the Network blog.
Strata: Kelly Strayhorn Theater
NPN Staff Highlights
NPN Celebrates 20 Years with Stephanie Atkins and Alec De León
This month we’re celebrating the 20th anniversaries of two beloved members of the NPN team: Stephanie Atkins (Director of Southern Programs) and Alec De León (National Programs Senior Specialist). Stephanie and Alec both joined the small-but-growing staff of NPN in the late spring of 2006. “I did not imagine that 20 years later, my life memories and work experiences would be intertwined with NPN’s continuing history,” Stephanie says. “Do you want to hear a good story? I got plenty to tell!”
Alec remembers the moment when he realized that NPN wasn’t like other places. He was watching a performance during a business trip: “There were giant video screens and pulsing strobe lights. There were naked people with bags on their heads. And then at the end of the performance, this huge, black, plastic bag starts filling up in front of the stage like a pan of Jiffy Pop popcorn, and it starts to engulf the first couple of rows, so it was covering me. And I thought, oh, this is my job, to see things like this.”
Please join us in celebrating the hard work, creativity, empathy, and friendship that Stephanie and Alec have brought to NPN over the past 20 years!
Artist Care & Labor
Doris Duke’s Creative Labor, Creative Conditions
The Doris Duke Foundation has launched a national campaign focused on the future of artistic labor, with partners hosting events from May Day to Labor Day that surface how the conditions of creative labor vary across place, history, and community. As part of the campaign, NPN is organizing “Artist Oasis: Recognition, Resources, and Recovery”, a one-day workshop for New Orleans-based artists and culture bearers, in early September. (We’ll share more information soon.) Other hosts include The Theater Offensive (Boston, MA) and Pangea World Theater (Minneapolis, MN), both NPN National Partners, as well as Wehiwehi (Honolulu, HI), exploring Indigenous performance in a digital age, led by choreographer, educator, and NPN board member Christopher Kaui Morgan.
NPN’s event is part of a long-term collaboration with Artists U, an organizing platform to change the working conditions of artists through peer-to-peer learning rooted in shared power. Our partnership with Artists U reflects one of NPN’s core tenets — that radical transformation is possible through connection and reciprocity.
Read more about Creative Labor, Creative Conditions.
Announcements & Opportunities
LACE’s First Traveling Exhibition
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), an NPN National Partner, has announced its first international traveling exhibition in its 48-year history, Excavación del presente / A Tender Excavation, currently running at Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT) in Mexico. This new iteration of the exhibit includes additional works specifically for one of CECUT’s 5,000 square foot galleries, offering a deepened dialogue for those who experienced the exhibition’s first installment in Los Angeles.
Visit LACE’s website for more information.
“Y’all Stopped Saying Black. How’s That Working For You?”
By Lauren Turner Hines
“Every time in American history that communities fighting for their survival have been told to change how they name themselves, their communities, or their own pain, the ask has never been about strategy. It has always been about control.” Lauren Turner Hines, founder and director of the Andre’ Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice, examines the suppression of language as a pattern of authoritarian governance and philanthropy.
Lauren is a New Orleans-based artist and organizer, and a recipient of NPN’s Southern Artists for Social Change award.
Read “Y’all Stopped Saying Black. How’s That Working For You?”
Native Performing Arts Live Production Grant Now Accepting Applications
First Peoples Fund is now accepting applications through Wednesday, July 8, 2026 at 5:59pm MT for their Native Performing Arts Live Production Grant. The grant awards $30,000 to a Native performing individual, organization, business, or collective developing a live production that “honors the ways in which ancestral knowledge, cultural teachings, and traditional spirituality are carried through dance, song, theater, storytelling, technical production, performance art, and more.”
Visit the First Peoples Fund website for full guidelines.
Upcoming Artist Activities
Riddims of Graffiti, a solo exhibition by Izia Lindsay
Now through August 31st, 2026, at DVCAI, Barry University (Miami, FL).
More info.
What We’re Reading
NPN’s Collective Learning Series
Each month, NPN’s staff and board engage with a reading that helps shape our analysis of our sociopolitical landscape and deepen our understanding of how to embed liberatory practices throughout our work. The Collective Learning Series is organized by NPN’s Department of Racial Justice and Movement Building (DRJaM).
Our latest reading is “Prefigurative Politics: Collective Work is Practice” by jazz franklin, a collective member of the New Orleans based PATOIS Film Collective. In this piece, jazz offers a third space “between apathy and unprecedented grief” for courageous work that reorganizes authority into collective, shared power.
NPN is generously supported by:
Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Louisiana Division of the Arts, Mellon Foundation, South Arts, Surdna Foundation, and our generous donors.
Past Issues
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