Biography
Rebecca Snedeker is the James H. Clark Executive Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, where she supports cutting edge research and artworks, and designs public-facing programming that is grounded in our surroundings and relates the local to the global. Under Snedeker’s leadership, the Center for the Gulf South has shifted from an emphasis on regional exceptionalism to the particulars of the local. Through cultivating understanding of place, NOCGS promotes individual and collective agency.
Snedeker co-designs transdisciplinary educational experiences with a climate change lens through projects like the Tulane Gulf South Indigenous Studies Symposium and Anthropocene River Campus, a collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Snedeker is committed to including, and elevating, the role of Black and Indigenous experiences and the role that regional studies can play in unlocking pressing national, hemispheric, and global imbalances of power.
Snedeker is an acclaimed nonfiction storyteller. Her body of work includes Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (University of California Press, 2013) with Rebecca Solnit, and award-winning documentary films, such as Land of Opportunity (ARTE France, 2010), Witness: Katrina (National Geographic Channel, 2010), and By Invitation Only (PBS, 2007). She serves on Advisory Councils for BOMB Magazine and Villa Albertine, and is the recipient of an Emmy Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.