Gabrielle Garcia Steib (SLA ’26) was born and raised in New Orleans, with family from Nicaragua and Mexico. A candidate for photography in Tulane’s MFA program, her work explores memory as a place — specifically ways in which collective memory and images are used to communicate in political landscapes.

Steib is currently one of 13 artists featured in the 40th anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual group exhibition of current photo-based work, “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging.” Described on the MoMA website, “these creative practitioners offer slowness, persistence, and care as an antidote to the viral, profit-driven speed of contemporary image consumption, metadata technologies, and artificial intelligence.”

Steib’s work focuses on documenting narratives that construct parallels between Latin America and New Orleans, using historical context and research and contrasting it with contemporary experiences — such as the 20th-century banana trade that created physical connections with the two places or post-Katrina migrants who rebuilt the city, documenting their children and the life they created in New Orleans.

“I try to engage with memory and images as modes of communication — memory as a fertile gesture [image as concrete evidence of a lived experience],” shares Steib. “I hope to continue exploring the tenderness and temporality of the human experience, and how grief and memory occupy space in this life.”

“Lines of Belonging” is on view through January 17, 2026.

 

Last spring, Classical Studies Professor Susann Lusnia received an email from Daniella Santoro, an adjunct professor in Tulane’s School of Professional Advancement and homeowner in the West Carrollton neighborhood near campus. Santoro needed Lusnia’s help in identifying a mysterious marble stone — inscribed in Latin — that she’d uncovered while gardening in her backyard.

Lusnia teaches Roman Art and Archeology courses in the School of Liberal Arts, and is currently writing a textbook on topography and monuments of Ancient Rome. Using key words and phrases from the Latin text, she was able to quickly identify the writing as a funerary inscription for a sailor in the Roman imperial fleet during the second century A.D.

“Susann is probably one of a few people on this planet who knew what this was and how to identify it, and she was a few blocks away from me in her office at Tulane,” says Santoro, who also earned her PhD in Medical Anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts. She had tried doing internet research and using AI to translate at first, before contacting Anthropology Professor John Verano, who put her in touch with Lusnia.

“This is a reminder that the specialized knowledge and experience that Dr. Lusnia has can never be replicated,” Santoro continues. “You never know when you might need a Roman archaeologist!”

Lusnia’s research went on to place the tombstone as one of several found in an ancient Roman cemetery in Civitavecchia, Italy, in the 1860s. In 1918, it was moved to the Archeologico Nazionale di Civitavecchia Museum before going missing following extensive bombing during WWII. Lusnia soon got in contact with the museum; over the summer, she was able to meet with the director and staff in Civitavecchia and view similar inscriptions from the site.

Since then, the incredible discovery has sparked interest across the globe and set off a mission to repatriate the item. Santoro also enlisted the help of UNO Archeology Professor D. Ryan Gray, who wrote an article for the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. WWL-TV later covered the story, eventually leading to the answer of how the tablet made it to a backyard in New Orleans.

The tablet was turned over to the FBI Art Crimes unit in May — the first step in its lengthy repatriation process. “We're looking forward to hearing when our lost Roman sailor finally arrives back home, and we can all celebrate his return,” says Lusnia.

 

Provided by Tulane University classical archeologist Susann Lusnia in October 2025, the photo shows the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus, discovered in a New Orleans backyard. (Susann Lusnia).

Tulane University classical archaeologist Susann Lusnia explains her investigation into the backstory of the 1,900-year-old gravestone for a Roman sailor which had been missing for decades from an Italian museum, on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

The Department of French and Italian is pleased to present a special event featuring internationally renowned musicians Donald Sosin (piano), Joanna Seaton (voice), and Alicia Svigals (violin), who specialize in live accompaniment for silent cinema. 

Join us in the Dixon Annex Recital Hall on Saturday, October 25, for two unique programs:
 

• 1:00 p.m. – Workshop on Silent Film Music and Improvisation. Open to all students and faculty, especially in Music, Digital Media Practices, and Cinema Studies.
   
• 5:30 p.m. – Silent Film Screening with Live Musical Accompaniment, featuring short films and excerpts from French, Italian, and German-Jewish silent traditions. Open to everyone.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to experience the magic of silent film with live, original music performed by world-class artists.
More info: http://oldmoviemusic.com | http://aliciasvigals.com
For questions contact Michael Syrimis at Reveal Email Address.
The Dixon Annex Recital Hall is located inside the Dixon Performing Arts Hall, building #69 on the Tulane Interactive Campus Map: https://admission.tulane.edu/map (“Uptown Campus”)

More About the Artists

Donald Sosin has built an extensive career in music and performance spanning more than fifty years. He has served as Music Director on Broadway and Off-Broadway and has performed as a keyboardist in numerous major productions, including Evita and Annie. His work as a composer encompasses television, theater, dance, choral and orchestral music, chamber works, songs, and silent film scores. With his piano, he has accompanied silent films at some of the world’s most prestigious festivals, including Italy’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and Il Cinema Ritrovato, the Thailand Silent Film Festival, the Shanghai Silent Film Festival, the Odessa InternatIonal Film Festival, as well as leading U.S. festivals such as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Washington, D.C. Jewish Film Festival.

Joanna Seaton, who is a professional singer, actress, lyricist, percussionist, and teacher, often performs with Sosin. Together, they lead workshops in songwriting, musical theater, and silent film music, engaging participants ranging from K–12 students to college students and educators. Their workshops introduce learners to song structure, lyric writing, and melody composition. The participants gain insight into how music deeply affects viewers’ perceptions of film, both emotionally and narratively.

Alicia Svigals, violinist and composer, is widely recognized as the world’s leading klezmer fiddler. Credited with almost singlehandedly reviving klezmer fiddling—once on the brink of extinction—she brought it renewed visibility with her landmark 1996 solo album Fidl. Svigals has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Allen Ginsberg and members of Led Zeppelin, and her writings on Jewish music appear in anthologies such as American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Since 2018, she and Donald Sosin have collaborated on performances of remarkable Jewish-themed silent films from the 1920s, combining piano and violin to bring these works vividly back to life.

More About the Events

The Workshop

For more than 30 years, Joanna Seaton and Donald Sosin have been creating music for silent films. In this 90-minute workshop, they will explore the art of scoring silent films, both for live performance and for recordings, illustrating their talk with numerous examples from classic films. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between film and music—a connection that applies not only to historic works but also to contemporary cinema. If there are student musicians in the audience, they will be invited to improvise for selected clips. The workshop offers a lively, hands-on introduction for anyone interested in film and in how music shapes our experience of it.

The Performance

The 90-minute performance program will be divided into three 30-minute segments.

French Silent Films

Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton will present a selection of short films and excerpts from feature-length works in their French silent film repertoire, accompanied by live piano, voice, and percussion. Possible selections include works by the Lumière Brothers, Alice Guy Blaché, Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Max Linder, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Fescourt, and others. Over the past three decades, the duo has performed these works at archives, festivals, museums, and universities across the United States and abroad. The program will highlight a wide variety of styles—newsreels, dramas, comedies, and avant-garde films—that demonstrate the richness and influence of French cinema from its earliest days.

Italian Silent Films

The second segment will feature selections from Italian silent films, drawn from Sosin and Seaton’s extensive repertoire. Donald has performed regularly at Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, one of Europe’s most important silent film festivals, every year since 1999, often in collaboration with Joanna. For many years, he also worked closely with curator Mariann Lewinsky on her Cento Anni Fa series, presenting century-old films from European archives. Possible selections include excerpts from Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria, Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus, Antonio Vidali’s Spartacus, Eugenio Giusti’s Signore Giurati, as well as newsreels and travelogues. Notable stars such as Lydia Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, and Bartolomeo Pagano (famed for the Maciste series) will be featured for their expressive performances.

Jewish Silent Films

The final segment will showcase excerpts from four Jewish silent films that Donald Sosin and Alicia Svigals have scored together, accompanied by live piano and violin. They will also discuss their collaborative composing process. Highlights include:

• Ewald André Dupont’s The Ancient Law (1923) – A powerful drama contrasting life in an Eastern European shtetl with the liberal society of 1860s Vienna, featuring historically authentic sets and renowned actors.
• H. K. Breslauer’s The City Without Jews (1924) – A visionary work set in the fictional city of Utopia, exploring the social and political consequences of an anti-Semitic expulsion law.
• Eleanor Antin’s The Man Without a World (1992) – A modern homage to silent film style, depicting Jewish, Cossack, and peasant life in a Polish village; though it appears Soviet-era, it was filmed in San Diego.
• Ivan Abramson and Sidney M. Goldin’s East and West (1923) – A spirited Austrian comedy-drama about a headstrong New Yorker who travels to Galicia for a family wedding and encounters a young Talmudic scholar.

Together, these films reveal the vibrancy and diversity of Jewish filmmaking in the silent era and beyond. 
 

Sponsored by the French and Italian Department, Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Center for Scholars, Maurice L. Silverstein Cinema Studies Lectureship Fund, Italian Studies Fund, Language Learning Center, Department of Jewish Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Tulane Global Humanities Center, and Newcomb Department of Music.