Current Awardees

The 2023 Humanist of the Year is Chef John Folse, a culinary professional, food historian, tv personality, restauranteur, and Louisiana culture bearer. A native of St. James Parish, Folse has offered Louisianans and non-Louisianans alike a window on Louisiana food and culture through his restaurants in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.

In 1995 he established the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, and it remains the state’s only four-year, degree-granting culinary program. Folse has spent a lifetime documenting, preserving and promoting South Louisiana foodways. He is the author of numerous cookbooks as well as The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine and After the Hunt: Louisiana’s Authoritative Collection of Wild Game and Game Fish Cookery.

Thanks to a $900,000 grant from the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation, the LEH has established the Institute for Louisiana Culture and History, a statewide educational hub providing reliable, accessible Louisiana social studies resources to students and teachers. The institute will provide professional development workshops for social studies teachers statewide and add 300 new entries to the 64 Parishes online encyclopedia of Louisiana.

During the 2022 Legislative Session, State Senator Gerald Boudreaux (District 24) championed the humanities and the work of the LEH.

His efforts led to significant state funding for the LEH and its statewide programs for the first time in ten years. He also introduced State Senate Resolution No. 97, which “commends the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities for its outstanding contributions to the state of Louisiana and to express sincere gratitude to the Prime Time Head Start programs for its lasting contributions to early childhood education in Lafayette Parish and in Louisiana.”

Northeast Louisiana–based documentary photographer Jenny Ellerbe captures cultures ancient and modern in her color and black-and-white work. Whether documenting monumental earthworks built by Indigenous mound builders or tractor trailer–sized cotton bales awaiting transport, Ellerbe invites viewers to consider the power of place in the Louisiana landscape.

In Necropolis (Harvard University Press), historian Kathryn Olivarius examines the intersection of race, wealth, and public health in 19th-century New Orleans, where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people.

In Roots of Fire filmmakers Abby Berendt Lavoi and Jeremey Lavoi explore the history and legacy of Cajun music through a look at contemporary musicians building new audiences—and new outlets—for the storied genre.

Since 2018 literacy advocate Megan Holt has served as executive director of One Book, One New Orleans, a nonprofit that works to provide literacy resources for adults and encourage community reading and dialogue. As director, Holt also oversees New Orleans’s Words and Music Festival and organizes countless book giveaways benefiting adults and teenagers from all walks of life.

For more than three decades, Marianne Fisher-Giorlando has worked to increase understanding of the American criminal justice system.

As a professor at Grambling State University from 1986 to 2012, she taught thousands of students, developing new courses focused specifically on the history of incarceration in Louisiana. Fisher-Giorlando has worked directly with the staff of the Angolite, the award-winning, inmate-published magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), and now serves on the board of the Angola Museum, where she has worked tirelessly to present an accurate history of Louisiana’s prison system to both inmates and the general public.

Since its launch in 2019 the Freedom on the Move initiative has digitized more than 32,000 ads placed by enslavers seeking to locate enslaved fugitives or jailers hoping to recover reward bounties for men and women captured while fleeing enslavement. The publicly accessible database, which includes teacher resources and some 10,000 ads related to Louisiana, is a rich source of information on the history of slavery and resistance.