In 2021, Tom Savage was appointed director of educational travel and conferences for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, following a sixteen-year career at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library as director of museum affairs and director of external affairs. From 1998 to 2005, he was senior vice president and director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where he directed Sotheby’s American Arts Course, and from 1981 to 1998 he served as curator and director of museums of the Historic Charleston Foundation. A native of Virginia, Savage received a BA in art history from the College of William and Mary and a master’s degree in history museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. Savage currently serves on the board of governors of the Decorative Arts Trust. He is a former trustee of the Royal Oak Foundation, the Attingham Summer School, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation. In addition, he served as a presidential appointee to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House from 1993 to 2002.

John C. Neville Distinguished Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts Candace Bailey teaches musicology at North Carolina Central University. Her research examines women’s musical practices of the nineteenth-century South. She has published widely on topics in this area, including Music and the Southern Belle (2010), Charleston Belles Abroad (2019), and Unbinding Gentility (2021). Bailey’s recent work includes a study of social networks among people of color in antebellum New Orleans, the idea of the salon in New Orleans, and transatlantic sites of memory and music. She has held fellowships from the NEH, the National Humanities Center, and Duke University, among other awards, and she currently serves as a Fulbright Specialist in American studies.

Alexandra Cade is a PhD candidate in the history of American civilization at the University of Delaware and an adjunct curator at the Sigal Music Museum. An interdisciplinary scholar and musician, Cade studies the material culture of music, performance, and tourism in the early 19th-century Atlantic world. She has worked at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and has undertaken fellowships at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Cade received her BM in viola performance from the Eastman School of Music and her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, where she completed her thesis on amateur-made antebellum American pianos.

Nick Spitzer is a folklorist and a professor of anthropology and American studies at Tulane University. He specializes in American music and the cultures of the Gulf South, and received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas in 1986, with a dissertation on zydeco music and Afro-French Louisiana culture and identities. As Louisiana State Folklorist (1978–85), he created films, festivals, exhibits, and recordings of regional music, and he co-produced a 90-minute Folk Festival USA special on Louisiana music for NPR, helping to bring Cajun music and zydeco to national visibility. Spitzer directed the film Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (1986) and has produced or annotated two dozen documentary sound recordings. In 2002 he co-curated Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts of New Orleans at the New Orleans Museum of Art. His weekly radio show, American Routes, reaches nearly a million listeners each week on more than 268 stations and via its website.

Leo G. Mazow has been the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) since 2016. A specialist in 19th- and 20th-century American painting and cultural history, he received his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most recently he curated and wrote the accompanying publication for Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art, which opened at VMFA and is on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through August 2023.

Robert Skinner has been collecting and restoring automatic instruments for more than forty years for private collections, individuals, and museums. He has been a member of AMICA (Automatic Musical Instrument Collector’s Association) and will be the host for the annual convention held in New Orleans in July 2023. AMICA’s mission is to educate the public about this unusual genre of music with lectures, presentations, and concerts.

John McCusker is a New Orleans native who worked as a photojournalist for three decades at the Times-Picayune and later at the New Orleans Advocate. He was part of the team that shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism for covering Hurricane Katrina. He is author of Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz (2012) and coauthor of Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians (2019), both published by University Press of Mississippi. McCusker builds cigar box guitars and repairs antique phonographs.

John DePriest is a linguist, musician, educator, and songwriter based out of Bulbancha (New Orleans, Louisiana). He earned a PhD from Tulane University studying the interactions of language and music in the brain and has been teaching there in the Center for Global Education since 2016. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, he is actively working to preserve the Choctaw language and music, including current work on an album of Choctaw music, set to be released in early 2024. He is also the singer, banjo player, and songwriter for the band Bogue Chitto.

Jeffery U. Darensbourg is a writer, performer, multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and activist for Indigenous place names and languages. He is a Louisiana Creole whose lineage includes French, West African, Choctaw, and Atakapa-Ishak ancestors, and he is a member and tribal councilperson of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation. For over a decade he has spearheaded efforts at reviving the original name of the city where he lives, Bulbancha (Choctaw for “The Place of Speakers of Other Languages”), which many know as “New Orleans.” He holds a doctorate in cognitive science, and his artistic work and research show a strong linguistic orientation.

Growing up in Pilette, Louisiana, between Broussard and Lafayette, Andre Michot was immersed in south Louisiana music from birth—first joining Les Frères Michot—the band his father and uncles formed in the 1980s —and playing along with greats like Raful Neal, Phil Guy, Larry Garner and others as a teenager. In 1999 Andre and his brother Louis formed the Lost Bayou Ramblers and began to play around south Louisiana, and eventually all over the world. In 2018 the band won a Grammy for their album Kalenda. Michot is also an accomplished woodworker and accordion builder. In 2006, with encouragement from friend and mentor Ray Abshire, he began learning first to tune in the old style, then eventually to build accordions from master builder Randy Falcon. With an incredible and growing collection of handbuilt accordions from all over the globe, his friends often joke that he could found Louisiana’s first accordion museum at his workshop in Broussard, Louisiana.

Amanda C. Keller is the manager of historic interiors and associate curator of the household accessories collection for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. For the past fifteen years, she has been researching and furnishing the historic exhibition buildings to create authentic interiors and designing the faux-food table displays. She has specialized in creating temporary installations that help bring the interiors to life. In addition to writing furnishing plans for the exhibition sites, she was given curatorial responsibilities for Colonial Williamsburg’s household accessories collection and the musical instruments collection. Her first musical instrument exhibition, Making Music in Early America, opened in 2022 in the Leckie Gallery at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. Currently, Keller is developing furnishing plans for the Williamsburg Bray School, Powder Magazine, and the Thomas Everard parlor.

Nina Bozak, curator of rare books at the Historic New Orleans Collection, previously worked in the special collections of both Tulane and Dillard Universities. She received her MLIS from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University with a concentration in rare books and special collections, after which she worked at Swann Auction Galleries and Bauman Rare Books in New York before joining the staff of HNOC in 2010. In addition to her work with HNOC’s rare books, Bozak is also a curator for its performing and literary arts collections.

Lydia Blackmore is the decorative arts curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. She earned an MA and certificate in museum studies from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware; she also holds a degree in history from the College of William and Mary. As curator, Blackmore oversees research, acquisition, and preservation of decorative and fine art collections. She manages the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South project and is coordinating preservation projects at the historic 533 Royal Street campus. In eleven years at HNOC, Blackmore has curated or cocurated several exhibitions, including Making Mardi Gras (2022), A Vanishing Bounty (2024), and Unknown Sitters (2024). Outside of HNOC, she is a member of the board of trustees of the Historic BK House & Gardens. 

Josh Kun is a MacArthur Fellow and an author, curator, and cultural historian. He is professor of communication and journalism at the USC Annenberg School, where he holds the chair in cross-cultural communication.

The sounds that flow from Honduras-born Oscar Rossignoli when he sits down at the piano reflect the path he has taken, starting at age six in his church’s worship band. He attended high school at the National Conservatory of Music in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where he began his classical training, while at the same time being captivated by the fearless improvisations of Chucho Valdés, Arturo Sandoval, and Michel Camilo. During the day Rossignoli devoted untold hours to his classical studies; at night, with fellow students, he experimented with Afro-Latin jazz improvisation. Sparked by the swinging, blues-inflected playing of the great Oscar Peterson, he embarked on a deep exploration of American jazz piano. At the same time, he began adding improvisational touches to the suites of Chopin and Debussy, blending the harmonic flavors of European classics with his own compositions. Upon completion of his studies at the conservatory, Rossignoli was awarded a scholarship in piano performance at Louisiana State University. “While I came here interested in studying classical and jazz,” Rossignoli says, “New Orleans showed me a world of possibilities in many genres and how they can all blend together. This city is loaded with world-class musicians, so it wasn’t long before I found a group of friends with the same passion, and I got to play with amazing musicians like Brian Blade, Herlin Riley, Jason Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, John Boutté, Donald Harrison, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Victor Goines, Joe Dyson, Bill Summers, the Masakowski family, and so many others.” In short order, Rossignoli’s calendar was full, with musicians calling on him to lend his exquisite touch to modern jazz, traditional New Orleans jazz, funk, bebop, gospel, and more. 

Holly George-Warren is the award-winning author or coauthor of eighteen books, including works on music and fashion, including How the West Was Worn (2001) and the forthcoming Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, with Dolly Parton. Her biographies include Janis: Her Life and Music (2020) and Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (2007).  She has served as a western wear consultant and featured speaker for several museum exhibitions and documentary films, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. A two-time Grammy nominee, she teaches at the State University of New York–New Paltz and New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

Charlotte Bentley is a lecturer in music at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, where her research and teaching interests include cultural transnationalism in the nineteenth century and operatic globalization. She was previously a research fellow and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Her monograph New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2022, and her writing has appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal and Journal of the Royal Musical Association, as well as in various edited collections of essays.

Joyce Marie Jackson PhD is chair of the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology and holds the James J. Parsons Endowed Professorship. She earned her PhD from Indiana University–Bloomington in folklore and ethnomusicology, and her core research centers on African and African diaspora performance-centered studies, sacred and secular rituals, carnivalesque identities, and cultural and community sustainability. Her research and publications have scanned the genres of gospel, blues and traditional jazz, and she has produced several documentary recordings with interpretive liner notes published by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Capitol Records, and the Louisiana Folklife Recording Series. She has also authored many scholarly works, including Life in the Village: A Cultural Memory of the Fazendeville Community (2003); curated numerous exhibitions with documentary photographer J. Nash Porter; and produced a documentary film Easter Rock, which premiered at the Ethnografilm festival in Paris, France, in 2016.

Sarah Duggan is the project manager of the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South (DAGS) project at the Historic New Orleans Collection, an initiative that documents and shares information about pre-1865 material life in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She leads DAGS’s work through data management, cataloging fieldwork, archival research, and two internship programs. In 2021 she co-curated the exhibition Pieces of History: Ten Years of Decorative Arts Field Work. Duggan holds a master’s degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of a Delaware, and a bachelor’s in history and religious studies from the College of William and Mary.

Freddi Williams Evans is an independent scholar who is internationally recognized for her scholarship on New Orleans’s Congo Square. She is the author of Come Sunday, A Young Reader’s History of Congo Square (2017) and Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (2011), which received the Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and is published in French. Her research and advocacy influenced the New Orleans City Council ordinance that made the popular name “Congo Square” the official name of the location. She is also the founder of congosquareconnection.org, which promotes the study of Congo Square.

Jordan Hirsch is a writer, researcher, and advocate for the culture bearers of his native New Orleans. He has edited ACloserWalkNola.com—the award-winning interactive map of New Orleans music history—since its launch in 2017. His writing has appeared in Slate, Bitter Southerner, the Lens, and ANTIGRAVITY, among other outlets, and he was a staff writer for the HBO series Treme. Since 2006 he has also worked through the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation to document the lives and promote the careers of the unsung heroes of American music.