NewsOne’s ‘20 Years Later: Hurricane Katrina’ Receives 2026 NABJ Salute to Excellence Award
As New Orleans marks the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a documentary examining the storm’s enduring impact on the city has received one of journalism’s top honors for coverage of the Black experience.
NewsOne’s 20 Years Later: Hurricane Katrina has been named a 2026 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence Award winner in the Digital Media — Online Project: News category. The award was presented Aug. 15 in Atlanta during NABJ’s national convention.
Hosted and co-produced by New Orleans-based artist and writer L. Kasimu Harris, the documentary was produced in collaboration with Emmy Award-winning executive producer Luke Burke IV and producer Ariel Wilson-Harris. Through Wilson Ave., her Black woman-owned New Orleans production and storytelling company, Wilson-Harris led the film’s local production strategy.
The documentary explores Katrina’s lasting impact through the people, businesses and cultural institutions that continue to shape New Orleans, asking what the city lost, what survived and how its Black communities have continued to evolve in the two decades since the storm.
“This recognition is deeply personal,” Harris said. “Katrina changed New Orleans forever, but the city’s story did not end with the storm. This film gave us an opportunity to center the people who protected its culture, sustained its institutions, and continued building.”
Centering New Orleans Voices
Wilson Ave. played a central role in bringing the national production into the fabric of New Orleans.
Wilson-Harris scouted and secured locations, connected the production team with business owners featured in the documentary and developed a local production strategy centered on Black-owned businesses, community voices and New Orleans cultural institutions.
“Local production is not simply logistics. It is trust, cultural fluency and access built through relationships,” Wilson-Harris said. “The people featured in this film carry essential pieces of New Orleans history. Our responsibility was to bring their stories to a national audience with the context, care and integrity they deserve.”
Among those featured are Dr. Dwight and Beverly McKenna of The New Orleans Tribune and the McKenna Museums; attorney Daryl A. Gray; Vera Warren-Williams of Community Book Center; Denise Graves of the Congo Square Preservation Society; Eve Haydel and Stella Chase-Reese of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant; Dook Chase IV of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and Chapter IV; and saxophonist and cultural ambassador Utopia Francois.
Together, their stories illuminate the people and institutions that have helped preserve New Orleans’ Black history, cultural traditions and community identity before, during and after Katrina.
A More Than 20-Year Collaboration
For Harris, the documentary also marks the first professional collaboration with Burke, a longtime friend whose relationship with Harris stretches back more than two decades.
The two met as Mass Communication students at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and later became fraternity brothers in Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. Their friendship continued long after college, including years of conversations about their professional ambitions and shared dreams over dinners in New York.
“From being Mass Communication students together at MTSU, to becoming brothers in Kappa Alpha Psi, to sharing dreams over dinners in New York for more than 20 years since, this moment is deeply significant and special to me,” Harris said. “And without Luke, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to share my Katrina and beyond story on this scale.”
The documentary’s NABJ recognition comes during an especially significant year for Harris.
Middle Tennessee State University recently named Harris the recipient of its 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award, the university’s highest alumni honor. He will be formally recognized at the MTSU Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremony Nov. 6, 2026, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The honors add to growing recognition of Harris’ multidisciplinary career spanning journalism, photography, writing, documentary filmmaking and contemporary art.
His ongoing photographic series, Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges, documents Black social spaces and cultural institutions that are disappearing or transforming. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) featured the series in New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging and acquired five works for its permanent collection.
Twenty-One Years Later
Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005. The catastrophic flooding that followed, including the failure of the federal levee system, devastated New Orleans and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents.
More than two decades later, the storm’s consequences remain visible in the city’s neighborhoods, institutions, businesses and cultural landscape.
For Harris, Katrina was also a defining moment in his development as a storyteller.
“Katrina’s wrath made me a photographer and gave me an unwavering commitment to telling stories,” Harris said. “Now, my practice is rooted in what it was, what it is, and what it will be.”
As the city approaches another anniversary of the disaster, 20 Years Later: Hurricane Katrina offers a perspective that extends beyond the storm itself — focusing instead on the people who remained, rebuilt, preserved traditions and continue to shape New Orleans’ future.
Watch 20 Years Later: Hurricane Katrina and explore NewsOne’s Katrina coverage