The multimedia series is produced by photojournalist Sue Jaye Johnson and radio producer Marianne McCune. The project includes a series of radio portraits on WNYC and NPR, a live event at WNYC’s Greene Space featuring women boxers, and a six-page photo essay in the New York Times Magazine.

Take a look at these videos and slide shows on the New York Times site. They’re incredible. And visit wnyc.org and npr.org beginning this Sunday for more information about the radio programs.

“She’s a force of nature…”

It was hot. It was really hot. She was eight and a half months pregnant and about to start a new season of 30 Rock when she took the time to join The Kitchen Sisters in a sweltering studio in New York City to narrate and host The Hidden World of Girls. Tina Fey, groundbreaking writer and comedian, off-beat champion of women, added her voice to power these illuminating stories of girls and the women they become.

It was your generosity and support that made these two hour-long NPR Tina Fey Specials and the 30-part Hidden World of Girls series possible. Your support helped share these stories with 22 million listeners around the world and helped give voice to a movement making deep change in the lives of women and girls.

We write to wish you well at year’s end and to thank you. And we ask for your continued support for the mission of The Kitchen Sisters—our radio stories, documentary work, and our education and internship program.

Stories are tinder. They can light a fire. As we begin a new year creating radio stories and multimedia documentaries we are more committed than ever to the telling of stories that hold promise of change, democracy, hope and imagination.

In the coming year we begin a new NPR series, Hidden Kitchens World, global kitchen stories of land, community and food. We have just received an NEA matching grant for this new collaboration and we need your contribution to meet this match. We will also be developing a highly interactive Hidden Kitchens phone app to further spread and collect these stories and create new ways for people to collaborate with us from around the world. Crowdsourcing stories has long been a Kitchen Sisters tradition and continues to be at the heart of our work.

During this past year we began some new collaborations–with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we chronicled their “Women Who Rock” exhibit and began documenting the lives of pioneering women musicians; with The Believer magazine’s annual music issue; with illustrator Wendy MacNaughton; and Pop-Up, the live-magazine phenomenon that showcases some of the country’s most interesting writers, filmmakers, photographers and radio producers, where we sneak previewed two upcoming stories, “Show the Girls the Snakes” and an excerpt from “Atomic Wine: A Trace of Bomb in the Glass” from our new Hidden Kitchens World project.

Much is on the horizon. Along with working on more stories of women and girls, we are writing a new book, Notes From the Kitchen Sisterhood: The Power of Storytelling, and producing our first audio book, 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering written and read by Alice Waters and Friends. We are also collaborating with Obscura Digital and the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music on “The Hidden World of Girls: Stories for Orchestra,” a multimedia evening of new music, radio, and images in July 2012.

All this comes to pass with your collaboration and support. The year ahead is a rugged one. Funding for public radio projects, especially the work of independents, is deeply threatened. Your participation is vital and so appreciated. There is barely one of you who receives this letter who has not contributed a story, an image, a contact, air miles, music, cheese, financial support or encouragement.

We thank you deeply for this creative collaboration and the power it gives us to build community through storytelling. All of your donations are tax-deductible. You contribution, no matter what size, makes it possible to do this work.

We send you and your family wishes for peace and possibilities in the complex and shining year ahead.

Forward ever,

Davia & Nikki
The Kitchen Sisters

Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton

“Hi, my name is Lacey and I want to tell the story of how I fell in love with my best friend…”

The film features experimental videos made by Woodman, excerpts from her journals and candid interviews with her parents, who are also artists.

Watch the trailer for the film here.

“I’m proud of her, but at the same time I miss her too much…”

Sound-rich, evocative, funny, and powerful–stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities. Of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide. These specials are produced by Peabody Award-winning producers, The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva), in collaboration with NPR reporters and foreign correspondents, independent producers and listeners around the world.

You can listen to and download the specials here:

Hour One:

Hour Two:

UPDATE: Podcast versions of the specials are available here (link will open in iTunes).

In this story, Burt Sugar’s account of the relationship between Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali is incredible. He walks us through their fights in two colorful minutes, including Frazier’s “bodacious, plus perfect, punch in the 15th round” that dropped Ali at Madison Square Garden.

Listen: 

In preparation, we’ve been listening to some of the rich offerings on the Australian radio show 360documentaries and wanted to share this piece, from Natalie Kestecher.

Producer Natalie Kestecher is on a mission to reunite a vintage dress with the former Finnish beauty queen from the 1950s or 60s who was its original owner. During her search she comes across the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, and the story of the Sampo, a magical but undefined treasure. What could possibly connect this glorious old garment to the mythical Sampo? The answer lies buried in this magical, mystery Finnish tour.

Visit the 360documentaries site for many more great stories.

Here’s more information from the Oakland Standard:

The Oakland Standard commissioned two filmmakers, Les Blank and Courtney Stevens, to make a short documentary about the Oakland Museum Women’s Board and their famous White Elephant Sale. The film, White Gloves, is now complete and will premiere November 4, 2011 at OMCA at 7pm in the James Moore Theater. A screening of the film (twenty-five minutes in length) will be followed by a conversation with members of the Women’s Board and a reception with live music by the Real Vocal String Quartet. Scroll down to read more about the subject of the film and the filmmakers’ approach.

The White Elephant Sale is an Oakland tradition. The sale began in 1958 on a pair of card tables, and has grown in scope and ambition every year since. In 2011, the White Elephant Sale raised an astonishing $1.6 million for programs and exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California. Bay Area locals use the sale to stock up on antique silver, cowboy boots, or gardening tools, but few realize that the entire enterprise is run by a tightly-knit group of 100 women.

These 100 women comprise the Women’s Board of the Oakland Museum. They are an all-volunteer group, most of whom have been involved for decades, and many whose mothers ran the sale before them. In a stunning expression of charitable largesse, grace, and impeccable organization, members of the Women’s Board work year-round in an unheated warehouse the size of an airplane hangar—collecting, sorting, cleaning, and repairing thousands of items, and mobilizing upwards of a thousand additional volunteers. In woolen layers and over communal meals, they assemble what seems a whole world in miniature, and sell it off in three short days.

More info here.