Current Awardees

A native of Cecilia, Louisiana, in St. Martin Parish, Dickie Landry is a true Renaissance man whose talents range from documentary photography and abstract painting to saxophone-playing and composing. During his 60-year career, Landry has used his camera to document New York’s art scene, opened exhibitions for artist Robert Rauschenberg, and performed as part of the legendary Philip Glass Ensemble. He is, as 64 Parishes columnist Alison Fensterstock writes, a “boundary-pushing creator.”

He’s also a connector, someone who has used his network to promote and elevate his fellow Louisiana musicians to the national and international spotlight. He helped organize a concert for Clifton Chenier at Carnegie Hall in the 1970s and connected Paul Simon with Terrance Simien for his zydeco-tinged, award-winning 1986 “Graceland” album. In 2018, he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. Now in his 80s, Landry continues to perform, create, and push boundaries.

The Charles Lamar Family Foundation supports a multitude of strong and dynamic nonprofit organizations that address important aspects of community life and effect positive change in their communities.

Since learning about the work of the LEH after attending an LEH Board Outreach party in 2019, the Lamar Family Foundation has made contributions totaling $97,551. These funds have provided critical support for Prime Time Family Reading programs in the Greater Baton Rouge Area.

Dr. Nick Mueller is a military historian and former University of New Orleans administrator who, along with historian Stephen Ambrose, helped create the National D-Day Museum. That museum became the National World War II Museum and is now one of the country’s top museum destinations. Mueller served as the museum’s founding president/CEO and, during his 19-year tenure, oversaw much of its expansion from a single 19th-century-warehouse structure to a six-acre campus that welcomes more than 700,000 visitors per year.

National Geographic Explorer Ben Depp captures Louisiana’s changing coast from a paraglider, forcing the viewer to shift their perspective along with his.

Depp’s photography has been funded by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. His work has been published in Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and National Geographic as well as in Tide Lines: A Photographic Record of Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast, a compilation of Depp’s work published in January 2023 by University Press of Mississippi.

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Dr. Elizabeth Ellis, an enrolled citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, tells the story of the smaller Native American Nations that shaped the growth of colonial Louisiana and continue to shape the Gulf South today.

Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s The Precipice follows the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe in the Terrebonne Basin as they work to preserve their culture and language while fighting for federal recognition and struggling against the realities of climate change.

Jane Wolfe is the founder of Eat and Read at Melba’s, one of New Orleans’s most notable nonprofit literacy programs. Through Eat and Read at Melba’s, Jane has encouraged a love of reading by distributing over 20,000 free books to her customers and hosting readings, discussions, and book‐signings that connect New Orleanians with world‐renowned authors and educators.

Freddi Williams Evans is an author and scholar recognized for her scholarship on Congo Square, a landmark of African and African American culture in New Orleans. In 2017–2018, Evans co-chaired the Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade to Louisiana.

The Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo’s Creole New Orleans, Honey! showcased the work of Andrew LaMar Hopkins, exploring notions of Creole identity while challenging the definition of the word.