The Kitchen Sisters
The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) are producers of the duPont-Columbia Award-winning, NPR series, Hidden Kitchens, and two Peabody Award-winning NPR series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. Hidden Kitchens, heard on Morning Edition, explores the world of secret, unexpected, below-the-radar cooking across America—how communities come together through food. The series inspired Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR's The Kitchen Sisters, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that was also nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Writing on Food. The Hidden Kitchens audio book, narrated by Academy Award winner, Frances McDormand, received a 2006 Audie Award.
Hidden Kitchens Texas, an hour-long nationwide broadcast special, narrated by Willie Nelson & Robin Wright Penn, premieres in the summer of 2007.
The Kitchen Sisters' groundbreaking national radio collaborations, in partnership with Jay Allison, bring together independent producers, artists, writers, archivists, grandmothers, NASCAR drivers, butchers, public radio listeners, and many others throughout the country to create richly layered, highly produced radio documentaries that chronicle untold stories of American culture and traditions.
Other noted Kitchen Sisters stories include: "Waiting for Joe DiMaggio;" "The Nights of Edith Piaf;" "WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts;" "Cigar Stories: El Lector, He Who Reads;" "Carmen Miranda: The Life and Times of the Brazilian Bombshell;" "Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Memories of an Invented City;" "Tupperware;" "The Road Ranger;" and "War and Separation." The Kitchen Sisters began their radio lives producing a weekly live radio program in the late 70s on KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz, California. Their radio documentaries have been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, the BBC, Audible, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Smithsonian, California Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, Soundprint, PRX, and are now heard as NPR podcasts.
The Kitchen Sisters are also involved in educating and training new voices for public media in an imaginative, artistic and creative approach to storytelling. They teach at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and give presentations and provide training at universities, festivals, workshops, radio stations, public forums and events throughout the country. They also train and work with interns, college students, and youth radio apprentices and participate in the life of the public radio community throughout the country.
In addition to producing radio, Davia Nelson is also a casting director and screenwriter. She lives in San Francisco. Nikki Silva is also a museum curator and exhibit consultant. She lives with her family on a commune in Santa Cruz, California.
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In the '50s, a group of Montgomery, Ala., women baked goods to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott. Known as The Club from Nowhere, the group was led by Georgia Gilmore.
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As Jay Allison — curator of the "Quest for Hidden Kitchens" — says, "If there is a single unifying theme to the hours of phone messages we've received, it's not about food, but fellowship." We end the year by sharing some of the hundreds of messages that have come in to the Hidden Kitchens phone line. -
In the vanishing farm country on the outskirts of Indianapolis, the Apple family and their neighbors have created a fellowship of milking. Hidden Kitchens looks at the Apple's efforts to bring raw milk to their community.
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Longer than three football fields, freighters ply the Great Lakes hauling iron ore, coal, stone and a crew of hard-working men who consider the skill of the cook before signing up for duty. Hidden Kitchens explores life and food aboard the Great Lakes freighters.
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Blacksmith Angelo Garro forges and forages, recreating in wrought iron and in cooking the life he left behind in Sicily. The Kitchen Sisters join Garro along the coast of Northern California as he follows the seasons, harvesting the wild for his kitchen.
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Our search for the kitchen legacies of this country has uncovered rituals, recipes and now, an archive. We followed a listener's call to the Library of Congress and beyond — and discovered "America Eats," a Depression-era project chronicling the nation's food rituals.
