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
Registration will open in July 2025
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
This October, we’ll gather together in person to reaffirm the power of art and culture in social movements, meaning-making, civic engagement, and liberation.
As we kick off NPN’s 40th anniversary, we’ll explore the artists, projects, impacts, and movements NPN has been part of, turning points in our sector, and how collectively we continue to build a more just and equitable future.
With the conference taking place alongside the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it will connect attendees with the complex and vibrant histories and cultures of New Orleans and the Gulf South.
Schedule At-A-Glance
Monday, October 6
- NPN National Partner meeting (afternoon)
- Conference opening events (evening)
Tuesday, October 7
- Conference sessions
- Evening Mini-fest (performances and excursions)
Wednesday, October 8
- Conference sessions
- Evening Mini-fest (performances and excursions)
Thursday, October 9
- Conference sessions
- Closing night party and dance-off
What You’ll Do
Engage with artists and their work through performances, readings, workshops, films, visual art, in-progress showings, 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, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and more.
Build skills and share models and methodologies in a format that honors community-centered practices, encourages honest reflection, and embraces complexity.
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.
Who You’ll Meet
NPN brings artists, funders, and cultural workers into reciprocity and relationship, challenging traditional hierarchies and building connection, trust, and accountability together.
The Future of Artist Mobility: NPN is partnering with the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) to host a conversation on reimagining artist mobility in today’s world. Guided by DS4SI’s framework, Ideas, Arrangements, and Effects, we’ll explore what’s working, what isn’t, and envision new possibilities together. This conversation invites artists, presenters, creative producers, funders, and administrators from across the field to collectively imagine healthier, more equitable ways for communities to have access to artistic work.
Artist-to-Artist Professional Development with Artists U: How do we build lives that are balanced, productive, and sustainable? And how do we do it together? In partnership with Artists U, we will host a series of workshops throughout the conference. Since 2006, artists Andrew Simonet and Michaela Pilar Brown have been organizing to change the working conditions of artists. Artists U’s work is community-driven, skills-based not needs-based, and grounded in “slow organizing,” with time for reflection and connection.
Cultural Movement Assembly: 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. This conference brings together a confluence of the art and culture sector and during this assembly we will develop a shared understanding of the problems we face, generate intersected solutions and commit to action.
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.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Everyone! The NPN Annual Conference is a place for artists, culture workers, funders, policy and movement builders, social justice organizers… and anyone else interested in the intersection of art, culture, and justice.
We will share information about registration, pricing, and other details in June. Please join our mailing list (see below) to receive updates.
Registration will open in July. We will share information about registration, pricing, and other details in June, so be sure to join our mailing list to receive upcoming information.
New Orleans has been National Performance Network’s headquarters since 2001, and with the return of our in-person conference, we say, “Welcome home!” While our work takes place across the country, we ground our actions in New Orleans and the South, believing no national strategy is complete without being inclusive of southern communities of color.
Known by the Choctaw as Bvlbancha, which means “the land of many tongues,” the city has always been a place of cultural exchange. Today, New Orleans continues to be a place fighting for racial, economic, and environmental justice, where artists and culture bearers lead the charge for social change.
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.