When Libby Neidenbach learned about Marie Couvent -- a wealthy free woman of color in New Orleans who donated property for a school – she was inspired to pursue more education herself. Neidenbach was a Tulane University undergraduate when she first heard about Couvent and primarily attended graduate school to research Couvent’s life and impacts in further detail. As she did so, she learned about other impactful women and how they achieved goals, often amid towering obstacles.
“My plan in graduate school was to become a professor because I thought that was what you did with a Ph.D.,” Neidenbach said. “I started working for the National Park Service in Richmond, Virginia. I worked at the house of Maggie Walker, the first African-American woman to be president of a bank in the United States. I was working there and also teaching and realized that I wanted to do something besides teaching.”
Neidenbach earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William & Mary. With her doctorate degree in hand and a new career path in mind, she knew she wanted to return to New Orleans, which had earned a special place in her heart during numerous trips to the city with her family as a child.
“When it was time to pick a college, it was Tulane or nothing,” she said. “I ended up going other places after that, but I always wanted to return to New Orleans. I love the city. I love its history.”
Today, Neidenbach is associate curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. She is responsible for taking care of items in the Collection, adding to it through acquisitions, plus researching and creating new exhibitions. She has been with the Collection for five years, previously working in visitor services and serving as the interpretive training coordinator.
Neidenbach is looking forward to helping visitors engage with history through the Collection’s newest exhibition, “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration,” which launched July 19 and runs through January 2025. It explores the links between slavery and mass incarceration through historical objects, textual interpretation, multimedia and data visualization.
“I’ve worked for the past three years with visitors services to create a special kind of tour for this based around dialogue,” she said. “It’s really based on the idea of mutual learning. Everyone has lived experiences and we can all learn from each other, especially when you’re talking about complex social issues. To me, it’s so important to make history relevant and help people connect the past to the present.”
Neidenbach said the most impactful work she has done thus far at the Collection is “Yet She Is Advancing: New Orleans Women and the Right to Vote, 1878-1970,” an exhibition that explored the role of white and Black women in the suffrage movement and traced Black women’s continued fight for access to the ballot after the federal 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote. The exhibition was first presented virtually in 2020, then an expanded in-person version was displayed at the Collection last year.
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“My office was right off the gallery, so I always got to hear people talking as they moved through the exhibition. I especially loved when people would say, ‘I never knew that,’ or relate something in the exhibition to their own lives, like their grandmother talking about the first time she voted,” Neidenbach said. “There was part of the exhibition with a question about whether voting is the most important right in a democratic society and a book where people could record their answers and explain why they felt the way they did. People went into a lot of detail. You could see the dialogue happening in the book. We had almost 1,000 entries there in six months. It’s always great to find a way for visitors to engage and leave their own thoughts as part of an exhibition.”
Neidenbach travels often to other museums, exhibitions and historical institutions. She was particularly moved during a trip last year to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where an exhibition on the Forten Family explored how they, as free people of color, navigated society and business across multiple generations.
“I’m a museum nerd,” Neidenbach said. “My passion for history probably comes from my grandmothers. My paternal grandmother was an educator who taught me to be curious about the world around me. My maternal grandmother was the real history buff. She took me to museums and historic sites. I had some really great teachers along the way as well. My AP U.S. history teacher in high school was the first person to inspire me to think about history as a potential field. I also had some important mentors at Tulane who were really encouraging.”
Neidenbach hopes other women can find similar support on their own professional journeys, regardless of where their personal passions lie.
“I think it’s really important to have a mentor that you can share anything with, who isn’t going to judge you and who is going to give you good advice,” she said. “Someone who has lived through more than you can provide a lot of perspective and give you a sense of the bigger picture.”
The “She Is” campaign is a partner-ship between Hancock Whitney and The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, The Advocate and The Acadiana Advocate to curate and share stories about women who are thriving – what motivates them, how they motivate others, and how women can continue to drive impact. Visit www.hancockwhitney.com/she-is for more details on Hancock Whitney’s ongoing work with female leaders and to share your own favorite “She Is” story.
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