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If it’s hot enough to cook an egg on the sidewalk and the tourists are as rare as a 7th Ward Falcons fan, it can mean only one thing – it’s 40 under 40 season!
Once again, our readers nominated some absolutely outstanding folks to be part of Gambit’s annual celebration of New Orleans’ best and brightest under the ripe old age of 40. From entrepreneurs and lawyers to musicians and chefs, this year’s list is chock full of amazing people who are making our community a better place.
Congratulations to all the honorees, and a sincere thank you to all the Gambit readers who took time out to bring these great folks to our attention. Without further adieu, here’s the 2025 class of 40 under 40, presented in no particular order.
Photo by Kat Kimball
504icygrl, 27
Musician; Event Producer
Ariel Riley, better known as 504icygrl, has stayed busy in the year and a half since moving home to New Orleans after several years in Los Angeles. She’s released several projects, including the albums “Fried” and “Smoke Some” with her partner PoppyH, a Carnival-themed EP, “Rollin’ with the Krewe” and the solo project “Caked Up.” Earlier this year, she hit the road on a headlining tour.
Riley also has joined Raj Smoove’s Gentilly Agency, and she and PoppyH have used their Krewe da Label — an outlet for their music and shows — to organize their own events, like the NOLA Secret Sesh series, to connect people.
Sesh events were inspired by events they went to in L.A. and Las Vegas, “where it’s a nice party with entertainment and basically somewhere people can smoke and enjoy smoking,” Riley says.
Secret Sesh events are usually outdoor parties with DJs and rappers, arts vendors and food. In just the past few months, there’s been pool parties, a barbecue, a “soul sesh” with Kr3wcial and Pro$per Jones and a 4/20 “MegaSesh” co-hosted with the Nola Reggae Festival. And past editions have been organized around stand-up comedy.
“A big goal in it is to spread positivity and inspire other people to do things like it,” Riley says.
Riley grew up in a music-loving household on the West Bank in the early 2000s, and her mom exposed her to a lot of local hip-hop. After moving to L.A. in 2018, Riley got into the recording booth herself when her friend had a little extra studio time. It went well, and she booked her own session the next day.
Taking inspiration from Nicki Minaj and Young Money records, Riley’s music is full of swagger, emphatic boasting and fun as she raps about weed, sex and bankrolls. And she’s always had a subversive streak, using lots of pink and album designs influenced by Lisa Frank and Bratz.
Her latest album, “Caked Up,” was well received, including a spotlight by Pitchfork, and Riley is working on finishing music that didn’t make it onto the project.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Chase Cassine, 35
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, AbsoluteCare
When Chase Cassine was 7 years old, he was fascinated by Dr. Phil talking psychology on Oprah, which he watched not too far from his father’s shelf packed with self-help books.
“I came from a family that talks about feelings,” Cassine says, rebuking the stodgy old adage about children. “I grew up where you can be seen and heard.”
It’s this kind of sharing that’s essential to Cassine’s work. Whether it’s with clientele or his interviews with various media outlets, Cassine feels like sharing a bit about himself when it’s “clinically relevant” or essential to gaining trust, especially with communities that are understandably wary of therapy.
“I have to see me to know that it can be me,” Cassine says about Black representation in psychology, citing Dr. Jessica Clemons and Dr. Corey Hébert as inspirations. He believes this is the key to his success with Black male clients, although he serves all kinds of people during his 120 therapy sessions per month.
Cassine’s mother died of breast cancer eight years ago this month, and in 2020, he had an opportunity to do something he’d always wanted: write his own self-help book. “The Sweetest Therapy,” published in 2021, is about how baking got him through his grief. It was during the COVID lockdowns and Cassine couldn’t attend his favorite activity in the world, second lines, so he had time to write.
“The Sweetest Therapy” opened doors in the media world, and Cassine has become a kind of psychology influencer in a way. Cassine has been interviewed by USA Today, The Washington Post, CNBC, Essence, Newsweek and Men’s Health, among many other publications — on topics ranging from grief to generational differences, screen addiction, self-care, nausea after sex and tattoo therapy and more.
“I don’t ever wanna pigeonhole myself,” Cassine says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Daniel Harris, 35
Co-founder and Director, Winston Rhea Scholars
For kids in foster care, “change is constant,” says Daniel Harris, who grew up in South Carolina’s foster care system and saw firsthand how years of uncertainty can negatively affect teens as they transition into adulthood.
But he also saw how the love, support and steady presence of caring adults can make a major difference. Unlike many of his fellow group home residents, Harris was lucky enough to develop strong relationships with two adults: his legal guardian Catherine Rhea and his high school basketball coach Winston Williams.
Both helped him navigate his way into adulthood and beyond. They became his surrogate family, celebrating his wins, helping him learn from his mistakes and providing a stable foundation from which he was able to grow and mature, Harris says.
They also served as the inspiration for the nonprofit Harris launched with his wife, Katie, in 2021. Though it was conceived as a scholarship for foster kids aging out of the system, Winston Rhea Scholars has no GPA requirements and provides support that extends far beyond funding.
Harris says he developed the program in consultation with Son of a Saint founder Sonny Lee III. At its heart, the program aims to mimic the broad support Winston and Rhea gave Harris as a teen and young adult, offering its 10 scholars four years of real-life guidance, emotional connection and community — as well as funding — as they move into adulthood.
Harris, meanwhile, remains close with Winston and Rhea, both of whom serve on the organization’s board. “I’m very lucky to have them in my life,” he says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Andrea “Dre” Glass, 38
Owner, Once Around the Kitchen and Cloud Brine Creative
Dre Glass is not just someone who puts hot sauce on everything.
She actually makes her own — along with pickled products, jellies and jams — as part of her business Once Around the Kitchen.
“Even though I make hot sauces, I still have like 12 in the door,” she says. “I’m very particular, like wine pairing, with my hot sauce pairing.”
Glass grew up on a farm in Ontario, where learning to make these products “came with the territory.” She started her career in the winemaking business, traveling around the world from New Zealand to Argentina. But it was New Orleans that stole her heart, and she’s called the city home for the last 13 years.
Glass started Once Around the Kitchen right before the pandemic. As a bartender, she started cooking en masse — channeling her Italian ancestry — and bringing quarts of food to local bars so that folks “weren’t just going home and eating like slices of turkey over the sink at 4 in the morning,” she says.
During the pandemic, she made the meals donation-based and began creating meal baskets. Around the fall of 2021, she started focusing on packaged goods over hot food. On July 7, she launched an online store.
Over the last couple of years, Glass has organized several art markets, including the monthly Beets and Brine since April 2024. The events, usually at Pirogue’s Whiskey Bayou in Arabi, feature a DJ and a bartender from another bar who puts together an original cocktail menu using one of Glass’ products and a local spirit from Porchjam Distillery.
After years of participating and running markets, she’s become keenly aware of the difficulties of being a small maker and has worked to help other small and micro-business owners navigate the space, particularly the city’s broken regulatory system. As a result, in March, she started Cloud Brine Creative, an event and consulting company.
“I think that rather than competing with each other, it’s always better to work together,” Glass says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Natalie Rupp, 34
Founder, Trans Income Project
When Natalie Rupp would hear a fellow transgender person needed money for things like rent or medical bills, she would pitch in what she could.
A former economist, Rupp believed the best way to help people in need was by giving them money, with no strings attached.
That turned into the Trans Income Project, which Rupp started informally two years ago and has since become a nonprofit. The group has so far been able to give out around $60,000 directly to the trans community in Louisiana, Rupp says.
“We are the only no barrier, guaranteed cash program for the trans community in the country, as far as I can tell, particularly one that’s run by community,” she says.
The nonprofit also runs a weekly free hot meal delivery program. So far, Rupp estimates they’ve been able to help hundreds of trans folks through their programming.
With recent news that Louisiana Medicaid has stopped reimbursing gender-affirming care prescriptions, the organization is now focusing on helping trans people pay for their health care, including everything from hormone replacement therapy to massage therapy.
“We’ve got our own backs because the government is telling us they don’t have ours,” she says.
Rupp is from Pennsylvania but has called Louisiana home since she was 20. She’s lived in New Orleans since around 2014.
She also does policy advocacy work, including helping draft a new law that protects sex workers from being arrested by the New Orleans Police Department if they report crimes committed against them while on the job. The city council passed it in May. She recently helped write the trans rights section of the United Nation’s Universal Periodic Review.
Rupp will start at Loyola Law School in the fall.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Michael Yang, 23
Founder, Culinary Medicine Initiative; Medical Student, Tulane University
Michael Yang, who is about to be a first-year medical student, launched the Culinary Medicine Initiative during his junior year at Tulane University through the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine.
The student-run, free cooking and STEM education program has already reached more than 300 young people, teaching them about the link between food and health.
The Culinary Medicine Initiative also collaborates with local organizations and covers topics related to wellness, including exercise physiology, food allergies, digestive anatomy and hands-on cooking.
Yang is the son of Chinese immigrants and grew up in Los Angeles, experimenting with both traditional and modern recipes.
He was a natural leader early on — as a kid he was an avid fan of the Food Network and taught cooking classes to his Boy Scout troop. He also had an affinity for first aid.
Now, Yang is blending his culinary passion with his path in medicine. After graduating from college, he earned a Fulbright Scholarship to get a master’s degree in nutrition and food science in England before returning to Tulane for medical school.
“Everyone wants to be healthy, everyone wants to live the best lives they can,” Yang says. “If we can introduce (young people) early on, through our free classes, and tie in these concepts, it impacts their everyday lives.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Talia Livneh, 34
Senior Program Director, Rooted School Foundation
Talia Livneh thought she would go into civil engineering when she left Lexington, Massachusetts, for Carnegie Mellon University. But after graduating, she chose to follow many of her relatives’ lead and go into teaching.
She entered Teach for America and was placed in a position teaching math at Helen Cox High School (now closed) in Jefferson Parish. She immediately knew it was the right choice.
“I fell in love with teaching,” Livneh says. “Like engineering, there’s lots of dynamic problem solving, lots of interesting situations and people. I felt like I was using my engineering brain, just in a different way.”
After three years at Cox and another year in a New Orleans charter, she joined a small team in founding the Rooted School. Their program sought to educate students and prepare them for career tracks, so in addition to English, science, math and social studies, the school offers classes in digital tech, and things that could open doors to fields like cyber security, 3D printing and software.
Rooted has grown to include schools in Vancouver and Indianapolis and will open two more schools.
Livneh also is administrating the school’s pioneering $50 Study program, an initiative exploring guaranteed income. Coming out of the pandemic shutdowns, they noticed kids missing school. Students said it was about resources, in situations where they were staying home to provide childcare, or picking up work to supplement family income. They piloted a program for 10 kids in 2020-2021, and the most recent program had 250 kids.
Students receive $50 per week for 40 weeks with only one requirement — that they stay in school. It’s helped students improve attendance, focus better on classes and take control of their lives. And Livneh helps them tell their own stories via a podcast and media stories.
Chef Ana Castro highlights seafood at Acamaya.
Photo by Cheryl Gerber / Gambit
Ana Castro, 36
Chef and Owner, Acamaya
Ana Castro was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs in 2022. It was fast recognition of her work at Lengua Madre, the Lower Garden District tasting menu restaurant.
Last year, she opened her own restaurant, Acamaya, with her sister Lydia Castro in Bywater, and they are quickly building a national reputation for it.
Castro was born in Texas but grew up in the Satelite neighborhood of Mexico City. There, she developed her love of food in her grandmother’s kitchen, and she later pursued professional training at Le Cordon Bleu in Mexico City. She has since cooked in India, Copenhagen and New York.
A stint in New York had her feeling burnt out, and she decided to make a change. After a break in Mexico, she moved to New Orleans, where Lydia lived, and rebooted.
At Lengua Madre, Castro designed dishes and menus around Mexican flavors and inspirations from growing up with family as well as experiences elsewhere. She was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef: South.
At Acamaya, diners enter to see the open kitchen and a modern airy space framed by tile and breeze blocks. Mexican flavors, spirits and visual aesthetics inform the restaurant, though the menu also highlights Louisiana’s coastal bounty. It recently became the first restaurant reviewed by the New York Times’ new national food critic.
“Things are going great. The restaurant has been really well received locally and nationally and we’re having a lot of fun,” Castro says. “A year went by really quickly, and it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Nikki Landix, 31
Owner, Lakeview Dance Company
It wasn’t long after Nikki learned how to walk that she started dancing at a studio at just 3 years old. In 2023, after saving her second childhood dance studio from the brink of collapse, Landix became the owner of Lakeview Dance Company.
“I hate when people call me the boss,” Landix says. “We’re a team, and I know that what we’re doing together is magical.”
Landix grew up in Algiers and attended Carolyn Diecedue Dance Academy, but her dance practice was waylaid by Hurricane Katrina when she was 11. It wasn’t until she attended Mt. Carmel that she joined the 8th grade dance team under the guidance of the former owner of Lakeview Dance Company, who suggested she take classes at the studio.
“I [convinced] my grandmother to let me go all the way out to Metairie after school,” Landix says.
After graduating high school, Landix continued to help out at Lakeview Dance Company while she was in college, teaching upwards of 13 preschool dance classes. The pandemic wasn’t kind to the studio, despite it providing Zoom classes. Pre-COVID, the studio had 250 students, and by the time Landix took over in 2023, the number had dropped to 100. Now, there are 170, with Landix’s goal of reaching 200 by September within reach.
Lakeview Dance’s prior owner was pursuing law school and Landix was a full-time preschool teacher when she was offered to buy the studio. And Landix at first ran the studio — putting her business major and minor in marketing to good use — while also teaching full time at Louise Hayem Manheim Gates Preschool up until last March.
Landix has since expanded adult classes at Lakeview Dance and hosts “parents’ night out” parties to help give studio parents a childcare break. She also has helped diversify the studio and built out the studio as a community space. Landix teaches preschool ballet, tap and hip-hop dance, her favorite style.
“I love teaching the little kids,” Landix says. “We don’t really dance like that, but we jump around and move our bodies.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Brooke Paulus, 36
Event Planner; Musician; DJ; Educator
As the child of carnies, Brooke Paulus spent her earliest years living in an RV and traveling around California. She loved to perform, and her mom would enter her into beauty pageants in each city they went to, as well as commercials, which ultimately helped put her through college.
With that backstory, there was little chance Paulus was going to live a boring, cookie cutter life.
“I have like nine jobs,” she says.
Paulus is the booking agent at Saturn Bar, DJs as part of the collective Solid Gold, teaches a daily after-school program, bartends and hosts events like Read the Room, a fresh take on the traditional book club. Since around 2020, she’s also been a member of LSD Clownsystem, an LCD Soundsystem cover band where the band members and audience alike dress as clowns.
Paulus attributes it to growing up in the ’90s. “There’s this kind of Barbie syndrome where you want to be an astronaut and a cowgirl and a doctor and a lawyer and all these different things,” she says.
They all might sound random at first, but there’s a throughline.
“Everything I do, whether it’s with the kids in my classroom or adults on my dance floor, I just want people to feel connection and love and leave happier or more in touch with the world and their community than they were before,” she says.
At her events, the goal is “partying with a purpose,” and Paulus has been able to raise money for causes like One Book, One New Orleans and Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners. She’s also seen firsthand how community shows up for each other in a time of need, including for her family after her dad died.
“That’s why I love New Orleans,” Paulus says. “Community is really at the center of everything.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Danny Cherry Jr., 30
Novelist; Journalist; Board President, Third Lantern Lit
Whether he’s covering the rise of Christian nationalism and what that means for Louisiana in articles for Antigravity or plotting a follow-up to his debut crime novel, 2024’s “The Pike Boys,” Danny Cherry Jr. says his writing is all “intertwined” around one thing.
“I’m a humanist,” the New Orleans native explains. “I view people as intrinsically flawed,” not good or bad.
As such, he’s equally interested in examining how, for example, members of the religious right can justify actions and policies their religion expressly rejects as wrong.
Although he didn’t initially plan to pursue writing outside of fiction and other creative work, Cherry has inched further into journalism this past year, publishing a series of thought-provoking explorations of the rise of fascism for local outlets like Antigravity and national platforms including Politico.
“I feel like we’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he says, referencing the increasingly dire political climate and mainstream media’s avoidance of terms like “Christian nationalism.”
Cherry’s willingness to tackle controversy while examining what makes people tick certainly translates into his fiction work, which he hopes to focus on more in the coming months.
It also makes his leadership role in Third Lantern Lit that much more interesting, given the opportunities for discussion the group builds into its programming. A self-described “cowriting community collective,” the nonprofit hosts events that add a social dynamic to the usually solitary act of writing.
The idea is to foster a local literary community for writers of any stage in their work. Events are neither cost-prohibitive nor socially exclusive, focusing instead on forming peer connections and encouraging growth.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Ingrid Victoria Ruth Anderson, 38
Makeup Artist; Fashion Designer; Founder, Human Horse Races
In creating the Human Horse Races, a local Thanksgiving Day alternative to going to the racetrack, Ingrid Victoria Ruth Anderson drew on her experiences producing events and a range of artistic and fashion endeavors.
“My world is all about character and world creation and inviting people to play,” Anderson says.
At the event in Easton Park in Mid-City, attendees sign up to race as horses or jockeys. They represent one of five stables Anderson created based on social caricatures, like the glamor-hungry Star Skufflers or the Patchouli Dusters stables. There are adult and kid races and prizes, and the event raises money for horse rescue farms. Last year, 2,900 people attended, and in five years, they’ve donated $16,000, Anderson says.
“I am into parties with purposes,” Anderson says. “You’re already on a soapbox; why not do something good with it?”
Anderson has pursued all sorts of creative projects since graduating from Loyola University New Orleans. That included producing pop-up art and music events in warehouses. She was also a vendor at the Frenchmen Street art market, where she sold crocheted beards, women’s underwear with pockets and other novelty items she created.
While growing up in Chalmette, Anderson got into painting and drawing and working with textiles. Sewing developed her interest in costuming, especially with fantasy and special effects make-up.
People hire her to make their costumes and to do makeup for marching krewes, as well as advertising and photography work and weddings.
Makeup and fashion are Anderson’s main focus. She’s also dabbled in bodypainting and recently painted a mural. She’s now planning the sixth Human Horse Races, where she will introduce carnival games this year.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Tenaj Jackson Wallace, 36
Artistic Director, The NOLA Project; Actress; Dancer; Massage Therapist
When Tenaj Wallace became The NOLA Project’s artistic director last August, she didn’t want to pick mainstream plays for the theater company to put on.
Sure, they do some classics, “but we just have to do things that kind of resonate with our little wild side,” Wallace says.
Wallace is taking the same approach with revamping the company’s programming in schools. Now dubbed “Stories that Matter,” they’ll first be performing “A Lesson Before Dying,” influenced by the story of Willie Francis, a young Black man who survived a failed electrocution in Louisiana in 1946.
“I’m basically trying to sneak my way into all the schools to bring them theater … that’s actually going to resonate,” she says.
Wallace, an actress and dancer, has been performing since she was a child dancing at Saint Augustine Catholic Church in Treme. She was in “Treme,” “American Horror Story,” a Lifetime movie — her mother’s personal favorite — and recently the box-office hit “Sinners,” which she originally only knew by its code name “Grilled Cheese.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like fun. Maybe it’ll be my next Lifetime movie.’ And then I show up, and I’m like, ‘Oh … that’s Michael B. Jordan up there,” she says.
When Wallace moved back to the 7th Ward, she noticed people looking for food in the trash. She’d learned from her mother running a food bank and started collecting donations and saving any money she could to buy food to give away. That eventually turned into a community fridge and free store. She also runs a toy drive around Christmas.
“Nobody eats out of the trash around me,” she says.
Somehow, Wallace, the mother of a toddler, also has been running a massage business out of her home for the last couple of years.
“There’s no time for anything I’m doing,” she says. “But my little silly brain is like, ‘You have to do everything.’”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Ryan Rogers, 36
Comedian; Founder, LGBTLOL Queer Comedy Fest
Ryan Rogers didn’t launch his comedy career until the middle of the pandemic, but the laughs are coming fast now. Rogers recently wrapped up the fourth edition of the LGBTLOL Queer Comedy Fest, and the following week he released his second comedy album, “Girl Bye,” which also is available on OFTV.
Rogers was already deep into a successful career before turning to comedy. He grew up on the West Bank and after graduating from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he jumped into advertising and moved to the Bay Area. By 24, he was a creative director overseeing two offices and in his jobs at Google and Pandora, he worked with clients like Disney, Mercedes and Clorox, he says.
When the pandemic hit, he was looking for life changes, including getting sober. He also wanted a more personal creative outlet. That led him to his first open mic at the Ugly Dog Saloon.
Rogers started touring, performing everywhere from gay bars in big cities to small town venues across red states, and finding common ground on everything from intoxicated misadventures to jokes about being married.
While Rogers produces and hosts several local shows, he also founded LGBTLOL to amplify queer comics and voices. It’s quickly become the largest queer comedy festival in the nation, with more than 50 visiting and local comics at the most recent festival.
Rogers also is building the LGBTLOL brand, and under its guise, he’s been producing the queer comedy portions of festivals elsewhere, including CloudTop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Sno Jam in South Dakota. With the brand, he’s helping queer comics elsewhere get on stage and get noticed.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Marlon “Chicken” Williams, 36
Owner, Chicken’s Kitchen and The Coop
Marlon Williams started cooking at the age of 4. His specialties back then included Kraft mac and cheese, bologna sandwiches and boiled potatoes and pickled meat.
“I was turning the stove on,” he says.
It wasn’t until college that Williams really began to hone his cooking skills. Playing football for several schools including Nicholls State, he saw it as a way to “watch my diet and my budget,” he says. He drew from his experiences in the kitchen with his mother and grandmother as well as cooking shows, while also adding his own twist.
“I went to Food Network University,” he says.
That coincided with the early days of Instagram, which helped Williams land his first catering gig. From there, he spent five years catering from his home and selling plates weekly.
In 2017, Williams started doing an annual fresh fruit lemonade stand with his kids. It was so popular that in 2020, there were more than 90 cars waiting in line by the time they started at noon, he says.
Clearly, there was momentum, so he opened his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, Chicken’s Kitchen, in Gretna, later that year.
Williams has a large social media following, and his business model revolves around hype. There’s a different menu of soul food each day, and the first customer in line gets a free plate lunch. The restaurant opens weekdays at 10:30 a.m., and when they sell out for the day, they close, meaning they often have a line waiting outside before they open.
He opened a breakfast and lunch spot, The Coop, last September.
Williams also hosts community events and school supply drives, and all summer long he’s been offering free meals to kids under 16 at his restaurants. He estimates they’ve given away 5,500 meals as of mid-July.
“We wouldn’t be nothing without all the people that decide to support us,” he says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Alexis Nguyen, 25
Interim Executive Director, Vietnamese Initiatives in Economics Training
“Community isn’t where you live,” Alexis Nguyen says. “It’s who shows up for you and who you show up for.”
That’s especially true in the Michoud area of New Orleans East, where Nguyen’s family settled in 1975 alongside thousands of other Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. Today, the neighborhood remains home to a vibrant yet isolated Vietnamese community.
“Showing up is so deeply rooted in our culture that you never have to question if you have a support team,” she says.
Nguyen clearly takes that ethic to heart. In August 2024, she took over as interim executive director of VIET, or Vietnamese Initiatives in Economics Training. Her mother, former City Councilmember Cyndi Nguyen, co-founded the nonprofit in 2001 to support members of the community facing challenges with English proficiency.
For more than 20 years, VIET has operated a wide range of programs including financial literacy education, counseling and fitness as well as assistance with tax preparation, Medicaid and Medicare applications and resource guidance for small businesses.
When Nguyen stepped into her current role last year, VIET faced a slew of challenges and was no longer reaching enough of the people it was designed for.
“There was a lot of disconnect within the different communities we serve,” she says. “A lot of people thought we only [worked with] Vietnamese people, but that’s never been the goal.”
Determined to reestablish VIET as an inclusive community resource center, Nguyen overhauled the website, social media and other communications platforms. She then secured new funding that allowed VIET to update its programs, making them more accessible and equitable.
“Everybody’s welcome here,” Nguyen says. “It doesn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you speak — everybody goes through some form of struggle, and nobody should be left behind.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Briana Whetstone, 39
Attorney, McCranie Sistrunk Anzelmo Hardy McDaniel & Welch; Co-founder, Crescendo; Advisor, Krewe Boheme
Even though Briana Whetstone grew up in a family of artists and always loved the arts, she knew from age 7 she wanted to be a lawyer. And yes, she knows that’s “weird.”
She grew up outside of Montgomery, Alabama, and came to Tulane for college. She then spent two years in San Francisco, working for George Lucas’ production company Lucasfilm — “because who doesn’t want to work for Star Wars?” — handling copyright applications for video games and coming up with the company’s social media policy circa 2008.
“I was still in love with New Orleans, but I also felt like I was going to marry the city and I was too young, so I got cold feet,” Whetstone says.
So it was back to New Orleans for Tulane Law. “I already had all the T-shirts,” she says with a laugh.
During law school, Whetstone and a friend started to put together workshops for artists and musicians, teaching them the basics of copyright and contract law. Since the end of the pandemic, she’s been teaching seven-week workshops with drummer and vocalist Lou Hill through the Ella Project’s Crescendo program.
One of the biggest issues Whetstone sees is people making music or art with another person without realizing each person has full rights to that.
“I always use the example of you’ve now had a baby with that person, and y’all have to co-parent that baby forever. You might not like their style, and there’s only limited ways you can stop them,” she warns. “So don’t get into these kinds of relationships willy nilly.”
Whetstone also is part of the Krewe of King James and helped start the Krewe Boheme parade, taking on an advisory role in recent years.
“I’m not from here, but I’m going to die here,” she says. “So I just feel a sense of responsibility to give back to New Orleans however I can.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Khiry Armstead, 33
Musician; Actor; Teacher, Isidore Newman School
Khiry Armstead moved around to different parts of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish growing up, leaving him feeling untethered to any one neighborhood in the city.
But it also has given him some freedom to break out of expectations of what a creative from New Orleans should be.
“I do a lot of things, and I really believe in that ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ kind of thing,” Armstead says. “I am so OK at so many things, but I feel so lucky to be able to try out many different things.”
Under his hip-hop project Kaye the Beast, Armstead is a gifted lyricist and producer, often winding larger concepts into his albums, like exploring the price of notoriety on “The Spaceman” or the range of love and lust on the EP “I Like You … I Think We Should Go Together.”
And then there’s his theater career. Armstead began acting while a student at Tulane University and developed his own theater works. He has appeared in productions with a number of local companies over the years, including the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane and the Promethean Theatre Co. — with whom he shared in a Big Easy Award for Best Ensemble.
An ensemble member of The NOLA Project, Armstead occasionally has directed pieces for the company, including its recent “Clown Bar 2,” about a bar in the seedy underworld of mobster clowns.
He’s also a teacher. He’s been with Isidore Newman School since 2018 and is now a full-time substitute with the school, working from pre-K to 5th grade and teaching everything from coding and math to Spanish.
Long influenced by actor and rapper Donald Glover and his Childish Gambino moniker — for his music and for his ability to work in different fields — as Armstead has gotten older, his aspirations have turned closer to home.
“I love my city so much. I want to be like Kermit Ruffins,” he says. “He can go anywhere in Europe and sell out, then come home, do a show at his own venue and then make people dinner.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
LadyBEAST, 39
Circus Arts Performer; Producer
Circus arts performer and escape artist LadyBEAST has wowed audiences with all sorts of feats. One of the most spectacular was an escape from a straitjacket while upside down, 100-feet in the air, hanging from a hot air balloon in 2018 at Burning Man.
LadyBEAST loves to revive old circus tricks, and she’s mastered bottle walking, in which she steps from one Champagne bottle top to another or a mix of bottles of different sizes. It was first popularized in circuses touring the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
LadyBEAST grew up in Philadelphia and trained in sports, including track and field. She had dreams of becoming a professional athlete and also of becoming an artist, and she found circus arts combined both goals.
She does aerial acts on trapeze, ropes and other apparatuses. She also likes Harry Houdini-style escape acts. Escaping from a water tank was another feat she performed.
During the pandemic, LadyBEAST joined the touring Venardos Circus. She did her bottle-walking act and a balancing act on stacked chairs for audiences across the country.
She has produced shows, such as Vaude d’Gras and more recently circus and burlesque spectacles under the marquis Vaudeville Revival, which feature local and visiting circus arts performers. She also trains other circus and burlesque performers
Earlier this year, she was gifted the original Venardos Circus tent, big enough for 300 seats. LadyBEAST is now working on bringing a full, locally produced circus under a big top to New Orleans and on tour as well.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Samantha Fish, 36
Musician
A life-changing moment came for Samantha Fish when she was 17 years old.
Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Fish was “very, very shy. I would cry if I had to give a book report in front of people,” she says.
But then one weekend, Fish and her dad were at a backyard party and watching a band play. Fish had picked up the guitar when she was 15, wanting to rock like AC/DC and loving music by Stevie Ray Vaughan. So when Fish saw the guitar player’s thin, Chet Atkins-style Gibson, she had to take a look during the band’s set break.
The guitarist handed her the guitar, turned on the speaker and told her to play something.
“I didn’t have time to really think about it — if I did, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” Fish says. “But I remember it being the most exhilarating and also terrifying and painful experience. It wasn’t good, but … people were really encouraging.”
Fish knew she wanted to chase that feeling — and she’s followed it into an award-winning, globe-touring music career rooted in high-powered blues rock.
She moved to New Orleans in 2017 and has achieved several new milestones in the last few years. Her 2023 album with Jesse Dayton, “Death Wish Blues,” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. Fish was then featured on the cover of Guitar World alongside rock icon Slash and rising blues star Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.
And she twice opened for The Rolling Stones in 2024, first at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and again on The Stones’ tour stop in Ridgedale, Missouri.
Fish released her latest album, “Paper Doll,” an electrifying mix of blues, rock and soul, a week before she played Jazz Fest again this year. Since then, she’s been on tour in Europe and across the U.S.
“I have a lot of dreamy type stuff I would love to do, but at the end of the day, the thing that’s most important is to have that freedom in making the music you want to make,” Fish says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Danovan Calhoun-Bettis, 35
Musician; Director of Engagement and Partnerships, MaCCNO
Around this time last year, the New Orleans City Council passed a guaranteed minimum pay rate for musicians playing city-funded events. Danovan Calhoun-Bettis, a musician and the director of engagement and partnership at the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MaCCNO), had a major role in crafting that ordinance.
The experience “let me know that I was in the right position for the things I was trying to do,” says Bettis.
Though the ordinance applies only to city-funded events, Bettis calls it “a starting point.”
Born and raised in New Orleans, Bettis began playing drums in church before joining the Marian Central Catholic Middle School marching band. From there, he attended St. Augustine High School, where he rose to head drum major for the Marching 100.
While going to Xavier University of Louisiana, Bettis started the 3rd Degree, which blends brass, hip-hop, R&B and funk. Today he also performs with T-Ray The Violinist, the Big Fun Brass Band and other groups on a freelance basis.
He knew what he wanted to do from an early age, as proven by a letter he wrote to his future self in first grade.
“In my letter, I wrote I wanted to be a famous jazz musician [and] travel the world … it all happened,” Bettis says.
Bettis was hired by MaCCNO in 2023, and he saw his own goals to advocate for musicians aligned with the group’s support for local culture, public policy and social justice.
Bettis knows firsthand how hard it is to get by in New Orleans, where musicians are severely underpaid while their music is celebrated. He aims to help musicians better understand the business aspects of their work and how to advocate for themselves.
“The goal for me, before there’s another version of Katrina or something like that, I’d like to provide the resources and the tools for the people to be able to, if they want to move, they can move and have a sustainable life — or if they want to stay and thrive here, they should be able to be able a part of that thriving number,” Bettis says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Chandler Monk, 28
Founder and CEO, Cleaved Diagnostics
Just months after completing her PhD in bioinnovation at Tulane University, Chandler Monk is already poised to help reduce lifelong deafness and cognitive disabilities among newborns.
That’s thanks to her pioneering development of a rapid, point-of-care test for congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common yet under-detected virus that’s the leading cause of both disorders.
Monk led her team’s development of the enzyme-based diagnostic technology that radically improves the accuracy of screenings while reducing the cost and increasing the speed of detection involved with traditional tests for the virus.
Although CMV is easily treatable with anti-viral medication if detected early, Monk says, Louisiana is not currently screening all newborns for the virus, in part because of the traditional tests’ cost and limited accuracy.
Last fall, Monk launched her own startup, Cleaved Diagnostics, using a $50,000 prototyping grant from Tulane to move the new tests forward toward marketability. Armed with a brick-and-mortar lab in downtown New Orleans, Cleaved is now working with the university and state of Minnesota, where testing for congenital CMV is universal, while beginning to research diagnostics for other diseases, including mononucleosis and herpes simplex virus.
For Monk, success “came with a lot of community support and therapy,” she adds, before letting out a chuckle, “and tricking your brain into not realizing you’re working as much as you are.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Lilly Meissner, 33
Designer and Founder, Relic Room; Backstage Tour Manager, Lana Del Rey
As a music industry professional and the backstage touring manager for Lana Del Rey, Lilly Meissner jokes that she is accustomed to “coordinating chaos.”
And although her career takes her around the globe, Meissner remains rooted in her hometown of New Orleans.
In May she started Relic Room, a line of hair and fashion accessories that exude an eerie, swampy elegance, with celestial elements and, of course, alligators. Meissner says her designs, which she hand-draws in the early stages of the process, reflect the aesthetic of New Orleans.
“It’s beautiful, but there’s a darkness, and there’s grit,” she says. “There’s a dark opulence that I really wanted to bring out.”
Meissner’s accessories quickly gained international attention after Lana Del Rey wore some head-turning gator-themed hair clips to the Met Gala as a tribute to her new husband, swamp tour guide and Louisiana native Jeremy Dufrene.
Still, Meissner wants her line of “everyday heirlooms” to be accessible to everyone, not just celebs. And her goal is to maintain ethical sourcing, high quality and affordability.
“My goal is to make these Southern Gothic luxury (items) that people can wear on a normal day, to a party, on stage or at a Mardi Gras event,” she says. “It’s not just for a dark aesthetic. I think anyone can put a gold alligator in their hair and it would look really cool.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Nina Balan, 35
Director of Strategic Initiatives, The Beach at UNO
Nina Balan credits her home country of Moldova for her success in New Orleans. The lessons growing up in the landlocked post-Soviet nation have carried her a long way.
“The level of perseverance and ambition that I learned from my community,” Balan says. “You just hustle, and it pays off.”
While attending the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Italy, Balan participated in an exchange program, which placed her at the University of New Orleans. At first, Balan was reluctant to come to New Orleans, but UNO soon became an anchor for Balan. It was not only the basis for completing her undergrad, but it’s where she got her master’s degree in hospitality and tourism administration and then a Ph.D. in urban studies, with a focus on tourism’s impact on climate change. And now she works for UNO.
She credits her internship with New Orleans and Company as a master’s student for exposing her to the needs of Louisiana. “I’ve always had a soft heart for communities that are disproportionately affected by life,” Balan says. “So it makes sense why I ended up here.”
Now, Balan’s role is to connect UNO students to eye-opening opportunities like her internship. As the director of strategic initiatives at The Beach at UNO, she fosters partnerships between academia and relevant industries, so talented graduates can enter various fields, including cyber security, hospitality, the Navy, AI, energy and various entrepreneurial endeavors.
However, her passion project is climate change. She led the development of workforce programs like Wind Scholars, which awards scholarships to students pursuing renewable energy, and KidWind, which equips Orleans Parish high school educators with resources to teach about wind energy.
Balan also speaks five languages, was a professional ballroom dancer, mentors students on renewable energy, is a board member of the New Orleans chapter of the American Planning Association and Women’s Energy Network South East Louisiana and Heart N Hands, and is an avid biker. That’s that Moldovan work ethic.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Lauren Sapp, 36
Deputy Director, Promise of Justice Initiative
At the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), attorney and advocate Lauren Sapp is fighting a multi-pronged war against mass incarceration in the incarceration capital of the nation. To do that, she and her PJI colleagues combine civil and criminal litigation with organizing, using what she calls “the umbrella of storytelling to reform and eventually abolish many aspects of the criminal legal system,” from inhumane confinement conditions and punishments to the plantation-style prison system.
Still, the challenges at hand can be daunting even for Sapp, a former Orleans Parish public defender who spent years often representing 200 or more clients at a time. But the Los Angeles-born attorney brings a unique arsenal to the fight, one that extends beyond her trial litigation skills and successful track record advocating for incarcerated people.
Sapp has a way of appealing directly to reason and humanity, even in conversation, whether she’s making a case for why New Orleans’ approach to incarceration hasn’t worked or explaining how “Black joy” drives so much of what she does professionally and personally.
Asked how the Trump and Landry administrations’ policies attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs, immigration and more affect her day-to-day work, Sapp admits she has wondered, “Is law even real anymore?”
But her answer to that question remains: “We have love and we have joy, and I think that all people should be allowed in some capacity to experience those things.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Marguerite Sheffer, 38
Fiction Writer; Educator; Co-founder, Third Lantern Lit
Nov. 5, 2024, wasn’t likely to be a dull news day, but that’s when Marguerite Sheffer’s debut story collection, “The Man in the Banana Trees,” was released. And it got attention. The book won the 2024 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
The collection ranges from stories set in the Gulf South to outer space. Its diverse array of subjects reflects the way Sheffer taught literature during a decade teaching history and English in a small high school in Oakland, California. She had students read everything from Ray Bradbury and science fiction to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a collection of stories about soldiers in the Vietnam War.
“I liked teaching ethical dilemmas and getting students outside of their own worlds,” Sheffer says.
She later attained a doctorate focused on design thinking and teaching creative problem solving, both to traditional students and adults in fields of social impact.
Sheffer and her family moved to New Orleans about eight years ago, in part to be near her relatives. She’s taught design thinking at Tulane University since.
Sheffer also decided to return to the creative writing she loved up through college. Maurice Carlos Ruffin encouraged her to enroll in a low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and she finished in 2023. She’s currently completing a novel.
She also co-founded writing collective Third Lantern Lit. Originally, it was for writers to meet up and share resources, and it has grown in many ways.
“I feel really lucky that a lot of the things I get to spend my time doing are genuinely creative and fun,” Sheffer says. “At Third Lantern, we host the events we’d want to go to for fun.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Dr. Nicole Ulrich, 38
Reproductive Endocrinologist and Fertility Specialist; Director of Advocacy, The Fertility Institute; Board President, Louisiana Fertility Alliance
Countless would-be parents in Louisiana face a complex network of barriers limiting their access to reproductive medicine each year. Dr. Nicole Ulrich wants to change that.
Through her practice and advocacy work, the reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist is working to bring a much-needed dose of equity to the state’s fertility treatment landscape.
Louisianans struggling with infertility can face significantly higher hurdles in their journeys to conceive than people in other states, like insurance policies that either don’t cover treatment or reimburse male and female patients at different amounts for the same procedure, Ulrich says.
Laws related to surrogates are among the nation’s strictest, allowing only heterosexual married couples to enter into surrogate agreements. Louisiana’s abortion ban has sparked ongoing controversy and confusion about what kind of care is allowed.
Ulrich says the closure of rural hospitals and women’s health centers only compounds problems in a state with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation. With cuts to Medicaid, the situation could only become worse.
In her advocacy work at The Fertility Institute and through her leadership at the Louisiana Fertility Alliance, Ulrich has voiced the concerns of providers and patients seeking clarity in the law and greater access to fertility care. Her campaigns have already helped push through legislation like Senate Bill 156, which clarifies questions around embryonic and fetal personhood and becomes law this summer.
As Ulrich sees it, fertility treatment “is health care,” plain and simple. “Having this technology in existence and preventing a large portion of the population from accessing it does not feel right or fair to me,” she says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Rebecca Hollingsworth, 37
Actor; Owner, Bonafried
When Rebecca Hollingsworth isn’t performing in stage productions, she and her husband Stephen Maher can be found slinging chicken sandwiches.
The pair began running their food pop-up Bonafried 10 years ago — perfecting their signature chicken sandwich recipe long before Popeyes. Over the years, they’ve expanded their operations with a rigged vintage Wonder Bread truck and are now gearing up to open their first brick and mortar spot just a few blocks away from the Fair Grounds.
It took some time to figure out how to work together, but Hollingsworth credits much of their current operation strategy to the theater.
“Once we started to run the truck like a theater, the atmosphere completely changed,” she says. “We also have a code word now if one of us gets too antsy: ‘Drink your juice, Shelby,’ from Steel Magnolias.”
She’s currently balancing her role as Maggie in a production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” with the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company. But she plans to take a step back once production wraps to focus on the new chapter, though not without some one-off cabaret performances.
Afterall, “I’ve been doing theater since I was in the womb. My mother did a play when she was pregnant with me,” Hollingsworth says.
Though they’re opening a physical restaurant, Hollingsworth wants to keep up the communal energy of their early food truck days.
“Everybody eats” has been their motto since day one. Ever since COVID, they founded the “Straw Hat Special,” a pay-it-forward meal program to support food-insecure and unhoused neighbors.
“It was this beautiful community that taught us how to operate and help one another out,” she says. “We’re trying to bring that attitude to the restaurant right now.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Kristiana Rae Colón, 39
Poet; Writer; Scribe Queen, Queen Reesie Collective
Chicago native Kristiana Rae Colón began her creative writing career through local spoken-word and poetry communities. Her early involvement in poetry organizations led to her discovery of theater. She first stumbled upon her gift for playwriting during a personal poem exercise.
“I didn’t know I was writing a play until I realized the character was talking to someone else,” says Colón.
She soon fell in love with the collaborative aspects of the art. “That magic of turning words on a page, a fantasy of vision into matter, is what really got me hooked on playwriting,” Colón says.
This passion eventually expanded to the screen, where she now writes and produces for Showtime’s series “The Chi.”
The 2014 Ferguson uprisings shifted the focus of Colón’s artistic work.
“The artistic exploration of oppression,” she says, “felt really insufficient to answer the social demands of the moment.” As a response, she and her brother launched a grassroots organization, the #LetUsBreathe Collective in Chicago, a group of artists and activists, which offers mutual aid, abolitionist healing clinics and other programming.
After tragically losing her partner, she relocated to New Orleans in 2023 – a place she calls “the land of miracles.” She says her creative mission is to “provoke collective imagination” as she continues to “bridge ancestry, art and activism.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Annell Lopez, 36
Author; Creative Writing Chair, NOCCA
From an early age, award-winning writer and educator Annell Lopez knew she wanted to tell stories. Born in the Dominican Republic, she moved to Newark, New Jersey, at 14 and later began her education career at a local high school teaching Spanish.
It wasn’t until Lopez took a creative writing class at New York University that she decided to pursue a writing career. That course was a catalyst for her move to New Orleans, where she earned an MFA in creative writing at University of New Orleans while also teaching. She currently teaches creative writing at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Last year, she published her award-winning book “I’ll Give You a Reason,” a collection of short stories set in the rapidly gentrifying city of Newark that explores themes of grief, love, loss and identity through the lens of immigrants.
“The book explored just how devastating having to be fixated over your immigration status can be for a person,” Lopez says.
“I’ll Give You a Reason” won the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Being recognized for a book about immigrants is meaningful to her, she says, especially in the current climate.
“It was a very emotional moment for me; to feel the impact that it’s having is an otherworldly type of feeling,” Lopez says.
She sees fiction writers as documentarians, too.
“I’m no historian, but I think as a fiction writer, we find creative ways to convey truths and capture a moment to remember for the future,” she says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Amanda Hampton Bravender, 36
Author; Founder, The Brave Farmers
Up until the COVID lockdown, Amanda Hampton Bravender traveled the world doing makeup for operas, musical theater and ballet. Now she’s on her way to making a honey empire.
“I want to be a face of New Orleans, a brand that people recognize, like Crystal hot sauce or Tony Chachere’s,” Bravender says. “But I also want to represent beekeeping, education and rebuilding pride in our local food systems.”
Bravender already contains all those multitudes and more: In addition to her dual professions, she’s also a mother of five and author of “Bébés, Beauty & Bees,” a book of family recipes, beauty tips and stories of her upbringing in Harvey.
She first got into beekeeping during COVID — TikTok helped fuel her thirst for bee knowledge and soon enough, she had two beehives of her own. Then friends started asking her to help them relocate bee infestations.
At one point, as she was starting out in bee removal work, a man told her “women don’t belong here.” Bravender saw it as a challenge. Enough that she soon after bought a beekeeper suit and started relocating bees to three acres of land she owns. And the honey started flowing — enough to create The Brave Farmers, her bee rescue and honey company.
She’s at 45 hives now, but her goal is to reach 300, which puts her in the territory of a commercial honey farm. The experience of building out her bee population landed her a book deal — which really cemented as she shifted its focus from COVID to her own personal history.
Bravender also teaches 4H classes about running beehives, gardening and harvesting honey, and she recently took a couple of teens on a bee rescue run. Where women certainly belong.
Photo by Kat Kimball
India King Robins, 38
Executive Director, New Orleans Video Access Center
When India King Robins was in college for journalism, she took a trip to New York to learn about internships in the media industry — and found out how little the industry paid.
“I needed to make more than $18,000 coming out of college,” says King Robins, a first-generation college graduate. “I just wasn’t in a position to dream in that way.”
In a lot of ways, that experience informs her work at the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC), where she uses her time at the helm of the 50-year-old nonprofit to plug its filmmakers into the film industry in livable ways.
Before King Robins, a queer Black woman, NOVAC used to be a predominantly white-led space. Since she started in 2019, she not only doubled the staff to 11 employees, but diversified it along various representation lines, including intergenerationally. She also gives employees unlimited time off (with approval) so that they can pursue their art on their own time, increased the budget by 30% and helped reinforce the pipeline from the youth programs to adult programs.
Recently, King Robins’ team helped staff the crew of the movie “Sinners” with local talent and held an early screening of the film, where director Ryan Coogler thanked NOVAC for their support.
Prior to NOVAC, King Robins worked in education, starting as a special education teacher and eventually became an assistant principal. While working full time in schools, she received her master’s in arts administration from UNO by taking night classes. In 2019, she was approached by the then-executive director of NOVAC because of the work she was doing in the community and took on the role, despite having no film experience.
Now, King Robins is producing a film series about Black maternal health and discrimination within the health system. Thanks to some classes she took at NOVAC.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Rachel Lewis, 37
Assistant Director of Training, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
In Rachel’s first year of teaching Spanish for Teach for America, in 2010, a roach dropped right in front of her face in the FEMA trailer she was using as a classroom.
“I had an unofficial job as an exterminator,” Lewis says, noting that she never actually killed a creature. “But we had so many joyful moments in my classroom — joy is really just so woven into the culture of New Orleans.”
Lewis’ career arc in education has bent through schools, prisons and now to recently released people via the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Teach For America doesn’t have the greatest retention rate, but Lewis has been in the education system for 14 years.
“I noticed that people who had respect [for] and centered the students’ needs were most successful,” Lewis says.
After teaching a mix of Spanish, math and special education for six years, in 2016, Lewis helped start Travis Hill, a school with one campus inside of a juvenile detention center and another inside an adult jail.
“I had students who were incarcerated,” Lewis says, citing it as inspiration to do her work with Travis Hill. “I didn’t really know what happened to them; it’s like they just disappeared.”
Now, at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, she helps plug unemployed and underemployed people into the environmental remediation industry, including people coming home from incarceration.
Lewis is also in the process of starting a nonprofit with the mission to reduce childhood incarceration by supporting young people in the city and their families and helping dismantle systems that are not set up to serve young people.
Alongside all of this, she’s managed not only to raise her two boys but also run social media accounts on how to be an eco-friendly mom, dances with the Cherry Bombs and has a specialty in costuming.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Bernell Elzey, 32
Professor, Antioch University; Owner and Licensed Professional Counselor, Conscious Therapy and Wellness
As a counselor and educator, Bernell Elzey works in schools and in a clinical setting, specializing in culturally sensitive counseling and empowering people from marginalized communities.
Raised by a single mother in the 7th Ward, Elzey started his career teaching English at his alma mater, Warren Easton Charter High School.
There, he noticed some of his students were struggling academically due to unmet emotional needs at home. He wanted to improve his ability to help young people succeed despite hardships in their personal lives.
“There was a burden on the students, so I wanted to focus on that and help them be secure and able to learn,” he says.
So Elzey went back to school himself, earning a master’s degree in counseling from Xavier University and a doctorate in counselor education and supervision from the University of Holy Cross. Now, he helps graduate students learn to be culturally sensitive counselors, and he also sees patients at his own practice, Conscious Therapy and Wellness.
“I have a passion for advocacy and community building,” he says. “I want to ensure all communities receive equitable opportunities to thrive.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Margo Moss, 39
President, L&M Environmental Response
Addressing an oil spill is never as straightforward as just cleaning up the oil, says Margo Moss. There are lot of considerations at play during spill response.
For large spills, the kind Moss has worked on as an environmental scientist and with her company L&M Environmental Response, clean-up crews have to watch out for endangered species, protecting the plant life to avoid future erosion and taking note of the human components, like areas where people live or public beaches.
“It’s problem solving,” says Moss. “But I think why I really like that spill response world is … it’s a meritocracy. There’s a lot of money and a lot at stake, so if you’re not good at your job, you’re gone.”
L&M Environmental Response, which Moss co-founded in 2016 and now owns fully, consults with local governments, industry and oil spill response organizations after large spills around the country. But that’s only part of what L&M does. Moss’ company has steadily been working more in post-hurricane environmental consulting — things like looking for asbestos or hazardous materials when a building needs to be demolished — and environmental compliance for larger companies.
Environmental consultants “can mean a lot, and it has shifted over the years,” Moss says.
Moss grew up running around the woods and streams in the country around Woodstock, New York, she says, and she inherited her mother’s love for gardening. So when she enrolled at Tulane University and moved to New Orleans, she pursued degrees that would help her better understand the natural world, including a master’s degree in environmental biology.
Her work over the years has taken her from offshore oil rigs to working on the BP Oil Spill — her first foray into spill response — and a stint with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
In 2021, Moss took part in Gov. John Bel Edward’s Climate Initiative Task Force, and she is the membership committee chair for the Spill Control Association of America. She’s also one of the founders of Krewe de Lune and is involved with the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association.
“Ultimately, whether I’m doing compliance for local industry or spill response, my job is to fix problems,” Moss says. “I fix other people’s problems, and I’m damn good at it.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Bianca Cook, 31
Founder/Creative Director, The NOLA Collective; Director of Strategic Initiatives, Ochsner Health
Ironically, Bianca Cook never envisioned herself working in anything media related. She pursued a career in health care, starting off as a registered nurse before transitioning to the administrative side of the business. It was actually a health care conference that pushed her to start The NOLA Collective, a media and consulting platform.
Since launching her platform in 2022, Cook has been able to build a bridge between both of her worlds, diversifying both the health and cultural communities in New Orleans. The platform now has over 40,000 followers and regularly partners with local and national brands like NOLA Miles Club, French Quarter Festival and Essence Festival to highlight a variety of local artists and activities.
She also is on the management team for Newtral Groundz, a marketing agency and media company that’s become one of the mainstays of the city’s social media space, blending history, culture, humor and commentary to inform and explain the wild city we live in. Cook also co-hosts the podcast “Standing On Business” with Amari Green about growing professionally.
At its core, the mission behind her roles is to get the community engaged and improve overall wellness. “Duality has always been a focus of the collective and a mission of my brand,” Cook says.
Photo by Kat Kimball
Kristen Rome, 39
Executive Director, Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights
The daughter of a criminal defense attorney and a hospice nurse, New Orleans native Kristen Rome comes from a family deeply dedicated to community service and social justice advocacy.
“My orientation to what I would do in life was always grounded in my family’s teachings,” Rome says. “Your work should be of service to your community, not just any community but yours.”
Early on in her career, she helped release juvenile lifer Shon Williams from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, who revealed the unjust conditions that children as young as 15 years old faced within the carceral system. This solidified her commitment to working in youth justice.
As a birth doula and executive director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, Rome has committed to dismantling the prison industrial complex from all angles. For Rome, restorative justice is rooted in the belief of nurturing communities from birth through every stage of life.
“I really began to see reproductive and youth justice as two sides of the same coin. My birth work became an extension of the work I was doing with the youth,” Rome says. “I think this birth work piece is a part of how we shift the paradigm around youth justice.”
Photo by Kat Kimball
Andrew Stephens, 31
Founder and Owner, Sports Drink
Behind the Sports Drink stage is a wall of classic, orange Igloo coolers. A stand-up comedian will occasionally poke fun at the vibrant backdrop, but when a post pops into the social media feed, the Toledano Street comedy club and coffee shop is quickly recognizable.
“The world is chaotic. I think we’re just in an attention battle,” says Sports Drink founder Andrew Stephens. “That’s why a lot of our social media stuff is non-traditional, like me tweeting at every Pelicans player, ‘Do you like premium dark roast coffee?’”
Pelicans player Karlo Matkovic responded to Stephens and came to a comedy show.
Over the last two years, Sports Drink has quickly grown from a coffee shop with occasional night-time events into a much-needed stage for comedy, now hosting almost nightly events and sold-out shows with Sean Patton, Mark Normand, Dulce Sloan, Liza Treyger and more. And earlier this year, Sports Drink organized the first Toledano Street Comedy Festival, featuring a dozen touring headliners and 50 New Orleans comics.
Stephens, a Baton Rouge native who studied journalism and sports management at the University of Georgia, moved to New Orleans in 2020 and was toying with the idea of opening a physical space for his podcast network, Sports Drink.
Stephens and his business partner, a friend who wanted to start a café, opened the space on Toledano in May 2023, operating as Junk Drawer Coffee in the mornings and as Sports Drink in the evenings. Last year, Stephens purchased the coffee assets (his former partner plans a Junk Drawer Space on Broadway Street).
Stephens’ goal is for Sports Drink to be a community hub. They have regular community nights to make sandwiches for community fridges and offer hygiene packs, snack packs and sandwiches to people who need them.
“The comedy at Sports Drink is the straw the stirs the drink. It’s what people are interested in, and it’s what we make our money off of,” Stephens says. “While the comedy shows are fun, this is a place where we’re open 14 hours a day … I want to figure out a way where we can be as effective of a mutual aid network as possible.”
Sports Drink now plans to open a second location in early 2026 near Jackson Avenue and Tchoupitoulas to host larger shows.
Provided photo by Leighann Kowalsky
Imani Gaudin, 26
Founding Artistic Director, Gaudanse
Imani Gaudin launched Gaudanse in 2020 to help bring art education to marginalized and underserved communities. The organization is a collective of interdisciplinary artists that spans dance, music, visual arts and culinary arts.
Gaudin, a New Orleans native, is a professional dancer who started performing at age 3 and studied at NOCCA as a teenager before obtaining a BFA at SUNY-Purchase. She is trained in ballet, African, modern and improvisational dance. She’s also an actor.
“I kind of tap into everything,” she says.
Gaudin’s performances often explore themes of identity, culture and human connection. As a choreographer, creative director and producer, her works have premiered locally at the Marigny Opera House and in theaters in New York. She splits her time between both cities. She also has performed internationally. In the coming months, she’ll be touring the second installment of “nanibu,” a performance that explores themes surrounding royalty.
“I live, breathe and sweat dance, and I love sharing it with other people,” she says. “It excites me that I can express myself, and it moves people … That drives me to keep dancing, because I’m spreading joy.”
Photo by Maddie Spinner
Ashley Shabankareh, 36
Director of Operations & Programs, Trombone Shorty Foundation
Ashley Shabankareh, the director of operations and programs for the Trombone Shorty Foundation, just returned from Europe with a group of young artists who were sharing New Orleans brass music on international stages.
The musician, educator, advocate and author says every day is different. She also teaches at Loyola and Xavier universities and serves on multiple boards related to music and education.
Shabankareh also is the board president of the Folk Alliance International and is working on a book about how to integrate brass instruments into pop music for modern band classes.
For the most part, everything Shabankareh does is centered around supporting young brass musicians as they navigate the industry and prepare to launch their careers.
“It’s all intertwined,” they say.
Music can be a tough way to make a living, but the Trombone Shorty Foundation supports artists with well-rounded programs that build technical skills while also mentoring them on fair pay and business savvy.
Some of the students start as young as 12, and Shabankareh always is inspired by how much confidence these students develop “in real time,” she says.
“It’s such a great moment as an educator to see them following the path,” they say. “It’s always about these ‘light bulb’ moments.”
Shabankareh also hopes to rally New Orleanians to keep supporting artists and local venues that employ them.
“Go to live music venues and support artists, pay the cover, tip the band, buy their merch, like them on social media and on streaming platforms,” they say. “The way we make money is heavily reliant upon the live event industry, and the more we can get behind artists, the more we can make sure there are stable incomes.”
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