2025 Artivist Awards: Meet the Awardees!

Introducing our 2025 Artivist Award recipients! Celebrate them along with the Trinity City Arts community this October.

We know you're already excited about the music by Dusky Waters, the delicious food donated by some of your favorite New Orleans spots, meeting the talented Trinity City young adult artists, and gathering with your community to take it all in…. but now it’s time to get to the BEST PART of the 2025 Artivist Awards– meeting our visionary honorees!

This year we are honoring three incredible women with Trinity City Arts 2025 Artivist Awards.  We are thrilled for you to meet:

Monique Verdin: artist, citizen of the Houma Nation and steward of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange.

Monique co-stewards Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, as well as an earthen mound on the Lafitte Greenway, the Nanih Bvlbancha.  She is a Gulf South Open School collaborator, and a part of the autonomous and alternative communication mutual aid project, SwampNet. You may also have seen her performing in shows co-created with our fiscal sponsor, Mondo Bizarro, including the recent Invisible Rivers.

Jennifer Turner (aka “Mama Jen”): community griot, avid reader, and longtime manager of Community Book Center.

Jennifer Turner, affectionately known as “Mama Jen,” is a community griot, an avid reader, and the longtime manager of Community Book Center, the literary hub of Black New Orleans. Born and reared in Central City on Liberty Street, Turner prides herself with studying and promulgating the history of African people in New Orleans, the nation, and the world. As a captivating storyteller, she weaves lessons that spark imagination, introspection, and a reverence for the contributions of peoples of African heritage. As the visionary of HomeFest, an annual celebration of culture and economic development on Bayou Road, she champions local Black artists and businesses. Mama Jen is a Black literary missionary, a curator of information, and a builder of intellect. In 2022, the Southern University at New Orleans Center for African and African American Studies honored her with its Living Legend Award.

Cierra Chenier: writer, historian, and storyteller born and raised in New Orleans.

Cierra's love for her city and its people was formalized in 2017 when she created NOIR 'N NOLA, a digital platform "preserving the history, culture, and soul of Black New Orleans" in response to the gun violence and gentrification impacting New Orleans; answering the call to tell stories that reassert the value of the lives of those in her community.  Cierra's historical writing of Black New Orleans has expanded to platforms like Scalawag Magazine and ESSENCE Magazine–with her most recently writing the cover story for ESSENCE’s 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina May/June 2025 issue. Her preservation work includes authoring two Louisiana State Historical Markers for the history of Dorothy Mae Taylor and Claiborne Avenue. Through her writing, storytelling, and narrations, Cierra continues to connect New Orleans' past to its present and future with topics of freedom, enslavement, resistance, displacement, environmental injustice, and preservation.

The Trinity City Artivist Awards were established in 2023 to honor local heroes like these.  Each year, we throw a big party to celebrate these artists, eat, drink, dance, and be in community with all of you! Read about the magic of last year’s ceremony in this essay by Trinity City Arts Intern Je’Miyah Suggs.

Last year, we honored Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Spyboy Walt Sandifer and Chakula Cha Jua.  The mighty Chakula passed away a few months after our party, and we are proud to be lifting up and carrying on the legacy of his community theater work. 

Our 2025 Awardees are extraordinary artists, culture bearers and community members, and we are THRILLED to lift up their work and give them their flowers! 

Join us at the Artivist Awards this October! Tickets are available now!