Bruce Sunpie Barnes is a New Orleans musician, actor, photographer, author, former park ranger, former high school biology teacher, former college football All-American, and former NFL player. With his musical group Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, he has performed at festivals and concerts in over 53 countries, playing his own style of what he calls Afro-Louisiana music incorporating blues, zydeco, gospel, and Caribbean and African influences. He is a multi-instrumentalist, mastering accordion, harmonica, and piano along with rubboard, talking drum, and djembe. Barnes has recorded seven critically acclaimed CDs, has had compositions featured in 16 Hollywood films, and has acted in such productions as Tremé, NCIS: New Orleans, and Queen Sugar. He is deeply involved in New Orleans parade culture and coauthored the critically acclaimed 2015 book Talk That Music Talk: Passing on Brass Band Music in New Orleans the Traditional Way, which features more than 300 of his photographs. His most recent book, Le Kèr Creole: Creole Compositions and Stories from Louisiana (University of New Orleans Press, 2019), includes a 15-song disc of music composed in Louisiana Creole. He is the Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, one of the oldest existing Black Carnival groups in New Orleans. Barnes is also a member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club.

Claire-Marie Brisson is a scholar specializing in North American Francophone cultures, cultural history, and language. She teaches French at Harvard University, where her work bridges literature, film, media, and culturally responsive teaching. Her research explores North American Francophone identity, memory, and place, with particular attention to regional histories across the United States and Canada, including the Great Lakes. A recipient of multiple teaching and sustainability awards, she is the author of the forthcoming book Michiganaise: Tracing Francophone Identity in the Great Lakes (Wayne State University Press, 2026). She is committed to connecting academic research with public dialogue and cultural institutions.

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.

Joseph Darensbourg is a native of Bulbancha (Choctaw for “place of many tongues,” aka “New Orleans”) from the Faubourg Tremé, the oldest free people of color neighborhood in the country (predating the United States itself). This neighborhood of gens de couleur libres is a triracial ethnic blend composed of Native Americans, Europeans, and African ethnic Creoles who speak a lingua franca known as Kouri-Vini as well as colonial Louisiana French. A performer of ethnic folk musics, Darensbourg is a singer, violinist, and percussionist member of the Les Cenelles ensemble, which specializes in music inspired by resistance and protest poetry and Les Cenelles gens de couleur libres, civil rights activists who opposed the Code Noir during Reconstruction. He focuses on the Bayou Ballads plantation songs (1840s–1880s). A bookbinder by trade—trained at the oldest bookbindery in the United States (Harcourt, Boston)—he is also a visual art alum of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, as well as a member of the oldest early music ensemble in the Americas, New Orleans Musica da Camera (founded in 1965, as was Darensbourg).

Rachel Doherty is assistant director for programming and special projects at the Center for Louisiana Studies, a public-facing research center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL). She taught French at UL while she completed her PhD in Francophone studies. She also taught in French immersion schools in the early 2020s. In 2017 and 2018, Doherty was a fellow at the Canadian Research Chair on Acadian and Transnational Studies at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia. Since moving to Louisiana in 2012, she has worked closely with populations invested in expanding access to French arts in minority Francophone areas. Doherty is the current president of the Louisiana Folklore Society. Folklore is central to her analysis of the way occult legends are recycled in French North America. She is particularly interested in the history and evolution of nationalist movements in Louisiana, Canada, and the Caribbean, examining the ways that folklore figures are continuously recurring metaphors in modern art and literary movements.

Brian Hawkins is an artist and filmmaker from Kansas City, Missouri, whose work is concerned with the patchwork of memories, historical narratives, and fiction that helps us form a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. He has produced a series of intricate cut-paper animations that draw inspiration from the music, folklore, and history of his native state. Since 2016, Brian has been collaborating with folklorists, linguists, and the people of Old Mines, Missouri, to produce a body of work inspired by Missouri French culture called Toujours Icitte (We’re Still Here).

Walter Isaacson is a professor of history at Tulane University and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a financial services firm based in New York City. He has been the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time magazine. Isaacson’s most recent publication, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon and Schuster, 2025), takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history’s most powerful sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023 by President Joseph Biden. Isaacson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts, and the American Philosophical Society. He serves on the boards of United Airlines and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Dennis Stroughmatt, from southeastern Illinois, is a multi-award-winning Illinois-Missouri French speaking fiddler, vocalist, preservationist, and educator who carries on the French cultural traditions that have existed in “Old Upper Louisiana” for over 300 years. Beginning in the early 1990s, Dennis studied with regional French Creole fiddlers and singers including Roy Boyer, Charlie Pashia, Pete Boyer, Annie Pashia, and Ida Portell, among others. He has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, at the Library of Congress, and at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and is a winner of Southeast Missouri State University’s Arthur H. Mattingly Award in Historic Preservation. Stroughmatt is a full-time instructor of music and theater at Wabash Valley College in Mount Carmel, Illinois. For more information, please visit www.creolefiddle.com.

Will Thompson is Dunavant Professor of French at the University of Memphis, where he is also director of the International and Global Studies program. He currently serves as president of the American Association of Teachers of French. Thompson has been named a chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Education. His research focuses on French heritage in the American Midwest, with an emphasis on the community of Old Mines, Missouri, as well as the manner in which the French Creoles of the Midwest were described in early travel and other writings.

Daniel H. Usner, the Holland N. McTyeire Professor of History Emeritus at Vanderbilt University, was born and raised in New Orleans and taught university students for 44 years, half of that time at Cornell and the other half at Vanderbilt. He is author of several books that include most recently American Indians in Early New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 2018) and Native American Women and the Burdens of Southern History (Louisiana State University Press, 2023). His current work, From Bayou Teche to Fifth Avenue: How Basket Diplomacy Saved the Chitimacha Indian Nation, is scheduled for publication by the University of Nebraska Press in spring 2026.