Asali Ecclesiastes

Director, Strategic Neighbourhood Development, New Orleans Business Alliance.
Educator, event producer, author, and performer, Ms. Asali Ecclesiastes brings her deep roots in New Orleans’ indigenous culture to the New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA) as Director of Strategic Neighbourhood Development. In designing equitable development strategies for high impact neighbourhoods, she believes in empowering neighbourhood leaders and making bold commitments to address entrenched disparities.

Prior to joining NOLABA, Ms. Ecclesiastes served as Claiborne Corridor Programme Manager in the office of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, where she advanced place-based projects and secured funding within six priority areas:  economic opportunity, cultural preservation, affordable housing, transportation choice and access, environmental sustainability, and safe & healthy neighbourhoods.

Before her brief and exciting life in government, Ms. Ecclesiastes worked as Congo Square Coordinator for N.O. Jazz & Heritage Festival, Artist Relations Director/Empowerment Seminars Author for Essence Music Festival, and Executive Producer of Tremé 200 Festival, N.O. Juneteenth Festival, Treme/7th Ward Arts & Culture Festival, and Akoben Words-In-Action Festival.  She has taught in New Orleans public schools, universities, and prisons, and continues to utilise her spoken and written word as a platform for societal change through art and social justice for all humanity. Asali has toured nationally with the critically acclaimed, ‘Swimming Upstream’, a play she co-wrote with a cohort of extraordinary NOLA women, exploring life in New Orleans after the post-Katrina flood, produced by the author of the ‘Vagina Monologues’, Eve Ensler. 

Ms. Ecclesiastes is a graduate of McMain Magnet High School and Vanderbilt University, where she earned Bachelors of Science in English Literature and Secondary Education, with minors in African Diaspora Studies and Biology.

Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes is a speaker at the Co-creating the City event on Thursday, June 21 at Pakhuis de Zwijger.