Rebecca Snedeker
Clark Executive Director, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South & Director, Musical Cultures of the Gulf South
Areas of Expertise
Biography
Rebecca Snedeker has called New Orleans an “unfathomable city” and has told parts of its story on film and in her writing. Now, she will continue to explore the many sides of New Orleans through her new role as the Clark Executive Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.
Snedeker is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, capturing an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Historical Programming — Long Form” in 2011 for her documentary Witness: Katrina. She won critical acclaim for the 2013 book, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (University of California Press), which she co-authored with Rebecca Solnit. The New York Times called the book an “idiosyncratic, luminous tribute” to New Orleans.
“New Orleans is my teacher, case study, and source of wonder,” says Snedeker, a native New Orleanian. She said that the directorship of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, which is housed in the School of Liberal Arts, felt like a calling.
“I was attracted to the center for its potential to support accelerated learning experiences that draw on the complexity of this place and its relationships to the world, to help us understand where we are and engage our collective destiny.”
School of Liberal Arts Dean Carole Haber said Snedeker has the vision and energy to support and grow the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. “Rebecca has a storyteller’s sense of place and a documentarian’s skill in managing multiple narratives. Her talents will be an asset to the center.”
The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South supports research, teaching and community engagement that focus on New Orleans and the Gulf South and explore the region’s place in the world. The center sponsors conferences, programming and service-learning courses, and awards fellowships to Tulane faculty and to external scholars and artists. Since its establishment in 2010, the center has developed a wide variety of music-focused programs, with the creation of the Musical Cultures of the Gulf South coordinate major, the Music Rising at Tulane website and K-12 educator institute, and the Trombone Shorty Academy and the Fredman Music Business Institute.
Education
Wesleyan University
Links
Media Appearances
Map Quests
The three previously published atlases collected in INFINITE CITIES (University of California Press, $75) — New York, San Francisco and New Orleans — use unconventional maps to bring social history to life. Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the books with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and Rebecca Snedeker, wanted to think about maps and what they represented in a different way. “Often we get a conventional map that will show highways or shopping, but you can also map butterfly species or romantic histories or violence or weather or pomegranate trees or Asian restaurants,” she said in a 2011 interview. “It’s really inexhaustible. You never completely know a place. It continues to change, and you can continue to explore it.”
For Mardi Gras, A Parade Celebrates Mexican Immigrants In New Orleans
"Carnival is such a reflection of what's happening with society," said Rebecca Snedeker, executive director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. "With the long, unfolding history of the city, there's been many groups of immigrants who have moved here and forged a response to carnival this time of year."
Group brings a Mexican flavor to New Orleans’s Mardi Gras
“Carnival is such a reflection of what’s happening with society,” said Rebecca Snedeker, executive director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. “With the long, unfolding history of the city, there’s been many groups of immigrants who have moved here and forged a response to carnival this time of year.”
Author Rebecca Snedeker, a speaker at this week's Tennessee Williams Fest, on the 'beauty and mystery' of writing
This week, four New Orleans-based authors -- all speakers at the 2014 Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival -- will contribute essays on writing at home, examining how the trappings of their work spaces and the views from their windows help bring forth the words. On Monday and Tuesday, Zachary Lazar and George Bishop Jr. shared their thoughts. Today: Rebecca Snedeker. Thursday: Thomas Beller
A Studio in the Woods in Algiers inspires filmmaker
Artists often look to nature for inspiration. In Lower Coast Algiers last month, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker met her muse at A Studio in the Woods, an artists' retreat hidden within a forest preserve at the far end of River Road.
