Culture Bearers: Common Threads is a portrait and oral-history project centered on the people who carry New Orleans culture forward through their lives, work, memory, and traditions.

The project brings together individuals from different generations, neighborhoods, disciplines, and cultural lineages to document the people behind the practices that shape the city. Through portraiture, interviews, archival material, objects, and personal stories, Culture Bearers explores how culture is inherited, protected, adapted, and passed from one generation to the next.

Rather than presenting New Orleans culture as something fixed in the past, the project focuses on the people actively sustaining it now. Each story stands on its own, but together they form a collective portrait of a city whose identity continues to be shaped by the people willing to carry something forward.

Culture Bearers exists to document, honor, and preserve the people whose knowledge, traditions, labor, and lived experiences continue to shape New Orleans culture.

By recording their stories in their own voices and creating a visual archive around their lives, the project seeks to preserve not only what they do, but what they know, where that knowledge came from, and how it will continue beyond them.

The mission is simple: give people their flowers while they are here, preserve what they carry, and make those stories accessible to the generations that come next.