Meet the Team – New Orleans Photo Alliance

Leadership

Lisa leads the New Orleans Photo Alliance and annual PhotoNOLA Festival. She has seven years of experience in a leadership capacity building community partnerships, fundraising, programming and team-building. Her prior experience covers production of photography, exhibitions, and travel photography workshops. Partners include National Geographic, the Santa Fe Workshops and Nobechi Creative.

Amy James’s photographs can only be described as transcendent and natural. She prefers to shoot while illuminating her subjects using only natural light and environments. This practice helps her to capture the sitter as well as the viewer in her lens.

Amy James shoots primarily in black and white, the traditional way, using silver and film. She was trained as a painter but was drawn to the darkroom upon learning it could create as much of a challenge as the empty canvas. James studied at LSU under Michael Crespo and Robert Hausey with Thomas Neff, her photography professor, perhaps being her greatest influence and mentor. James exhibits in many venues throughout the South with permanent exhibits displayed in Ruston, Baton Rouge, Birmingham and Dallas.

Her writings and photography have been published regionally in magazines such as Louisiana Home & Garden, Country Roads, Delta Style, and nationally in Veranda and Ladies Home Journal, and internationally in SHOTS magazine

Camille Barnett

Director of Communications and Programs

Camille Barnett is a New Orleans-native creative. With a minor and journalism and over 6 years of professional experience as a photographer/photojournalist, she is accustomed to telling stories and telling them with care. When not telling stories through camera or pen, she serves as coordinator and project manger in the production world as well as for local nonprofits.

Sophie Clay

Director of Operations

Sophia Clay is a photographer from the Mississippi Delta, living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work centers around the temporality of the man made within the natural, often focusing on how the natural world reclaims a space. She finds a particular beauty in ordinary or mundane objects. Clay is represented by Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi.

This could be you

NOPA Leadership

Board of Directors

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes

Board President

Bruce Sunpie Barnes is a New Orleans musician, former park ranger with the National Park Service, actor, photographer, book author, former high school biology teacher, former college football All-American, and former NFL player (Kansas City Chiefs). Sunpie Barnes’ many careers have taken him far and wide. He has traveled to over 53 countries playing his own style of what he calls Afro-Louisiana music incorporating blues, zydeco, gospel, Caribbean and African influenced rhythms and melodies. He is a multi-instrumentalist, mastering accordion, harmonica, and piano along with rubboard, talking drum, and dejembe. He learned accordion from some of the best Zydeco pioneers in Louisiana, including Fernest Arceneaux, John Delafose, and Clayton Sampy. Along with his musical group Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, he has performed at festivals and concerts across the US and around the globe. He has collaborated with music gurus such as Harold Brown (WAR), Willie Dixon (Father of Chicago Blues),and Trey Anastasio (Phish). Sunpie has recorded 7 critically acclaimed CDs with his compositions currently featured in 16 Hollywood film productions. In addition to this musical work he is also a former member of the Paul Simon Band that embarked on a 58 city world tour “Paul Simon and Sting Together”, which span 47 countries (2014,15 and 16). In 2018 Latin Super Star Carlos Vives invited Sunpie along with the Louisiana Sunspots perform with him at the 51st annual Vallenato Festival in Valledupar, Coloumbia. Film acting has also been a important part of his busy career. Sunpie’s work has appeared in such Hollywood productions as Point of No Return, Deja Vu, Under Cover Blues, Jonah Hex, Treme,The Big Easy, Skeleton Key, Heartless, The Gates Of Silence Odd Girl Out, The African Americans, Sesame Street, NCIS New Orleans, Queen Sugar and Mayfair Witches. He is deeply involved in New Orleans parade culture and co-authored the 2015 critically acclaimed book “Talk That Music Talk” – Passing On Brass Band Music In New Orleans “The Traditional Way”. Over 300 of Sunpie’s photographs are featured in this book. Le Kèr Creole is his latest book that also has a 15 song disc of music composted in Louisiana Creole. He is the Big Chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, one of the oldest existing Black Carnival groups in New Orleans. Sunpie is also a member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club

Eli Mergel

Board Member

Eli has gained a large portfolio in event, street, and architectural photography over the years. With a career in Information Technology and a past life within the Marines, Eli has the advantage of being on the cutting-edge while also being down-to-earth. When he is not in NYC shooting candid street, he can be found in New Orleans shooting street events and local culture.

Leslie Tabony

Board Member

A self-taught digital photographer based in New Orleans, LA, leslie Tabony, is an artist using her own associations as she creates narratives which focus on the sublime and the ethereal.

The relationship of longing, sensuality and spirituality are often explored in her love of the portraiture of women.

Her work uses unusual light, diffusion, soft focus, a pictorial aesthetic and compositions to find the beauty in paring a visceral emotion amidst paradoxical extremes.

Infinitude, vulnerability, submission, reverence, sexuality, stillness, and quietude are weaved together — So too are poetry, philosophy, eras of times gone by — 18th, 19th and early 20th century.

Her work is mostly black and white, but sepia, duotones and even colour are used depending on the Body of Work.