Biography
Monique Verdin is an interdisciplinary storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a member of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities, and sustainable ecologies. She is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.
Nick Slie is a New Orleans-born performer, producer and cultural organizer. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Mondo Bizarro and an Associate Professor of Theater and Video Production at Nunez Community College. Since 2002, Nick has toured a wide array of imaginative projects to art centers, universities and outdoor locations in 38 states across the country and abroad. However, he is most proud of the work he does at home, where the land kisses the water. Nick’s creative endeavors range from interdisciplinary solo performances to large-scale community festivals, from innovative digital storytelling projects to site-responsive productions. From 2004- 2008, he served on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS, is the former board chair for the Network of Ensemble Theaters and currently serves on the board for Goat in the Road and the North American Cultural Laboratory. Nick recently directed Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man and is currently developing Invisible Rivers.
Research
Invisible Rivers is a project that employs the artistic practices of music, live performance, cultural organizing and boat-building to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, environmental racism and displacement. We are building boats in rapidly disappearing areas of our coast and hosting dialogues, scientific research and performances on them. Working with her family of indigenous Houma Nation boat builders, who work as welders in South Louisiana’s oil fields, Monique Verdin has already researched and developed a Float Lab that will travel by land and water to communities who will host the Invisible Rivers activations. Through Invisible Rivers, we are creating a project that does not simply name the problems but in some intentional and beautiful way becomes a part of the solution. One such solution is to divest ourselves from the need for fossil fuels when navigating the Float Lab by water from location to location. As such, we propose to use the Monroe Fellowship for the research and development of a solar powered electric propulsion system for the Float Lab. The learning from this process will be shared with community stakeholders in the form of public workshops.
