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 first installment of the new season of Hidden Kitchens, The Kitchen Sisters explore how Sicilians are reclaiming farmland and providing Mafia-free jobs in a region gripped by corruption. -
The birth of Rice-A-Roni began with a friendship between a Canadian immigrant and a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Soon after, an Italian family made "the San Francisco treat" into a popular side dish.
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London's "allotment" gardens are an unusual system of community gardens across the city. Tended by immigrants, retirees, chefs and fans of fresh food, they make up a kitchen community like no other.
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In the last century, Basque people fleeing Francisco Franco's dictatorship flocked to America. "Hidden Kitchens" explores their world of outdoor, below-the-ground, Dutch oven cooking traditions.
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Hidden Kitchens travels to the Louisiana State Penitentiary and the world of unexpected, below-the-radar, down-home convict cooking at the Angola Prison Rodeo. The event, which draws thousands of spectators, features traditional dishes prepared and sold by inmates at the prison farm.
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Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She is known for her ritual celebrations of Parsi New Year on the first day of spring, when she creates an elaborate ceremonial meal based on the auspicious foods and traditions of her vanishing culture. -
Hercules, a slave of George Washington, and James Hemings, owned by Thomas Jefferson, began a long connection of presidents and their African-American cooks. And President Lyndon Johnson's black cook may have influenced his work on civil rights reform.
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In the late 1870s, Lebanese immigrants began arriving in the Mississippi Delta, working first as peddlers, then grocers and restaurateurs. Kibbe, a meatloaf of sorts, is part of the glue that continues to hold the Lebanese family culture together in the Delta and beyond.
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After Pearl Harbor, about 120,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted and forced to live for years in federal camps. Internment changed the traditional Japanese diet and erased the family table.
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The Kitchen Sisters explore the saga of a Texas corn chip and C.E. Doolin, the can-do visionary behind it. Doolin, who envisioned Fritos as a side dish, never imagined anyone would consume an entire king size bag. The story of the Frito is the latest in the "Hidden Kitchens" series.
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NASA's Johnson Space Center invited The Kitchen Sisters to visit its "hidden kitchen." On the eve of NASA's scheduled launch of space shuttle Atlantis, The Kitchen Sisters present a brief history of space food.
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On the eve of Mozart's 251st birthday, The Kitchen Sisters take us to Vienna, to Mozart's Hidden Kitchen: "The Tables of New Crowned Hope." The festival honored the composer's free-thinking philosophy, innovation and radical music.
