Denise Frazier is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She is the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bioregion stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities.

Her scholarly retreat at A Studio in the Woods will be used to research the following concepts: material culture, chemicals and food production, cancer, creosote, and the neighborhood of Fifth Ward with the purpose of further partnerships, research projects, songs in Kouri Vini, and programs with artists and scholars and community around these topics.