Bring Your Own is a live storytelling pop-up series that takes place in living rooms, backyards, after-hours storefronts and other intimate spaces within the New Orleans community. Each month, seven storytellers have seven minutes to respond to a theme. Stories are told live, unscripted, and true to the teller.

Bring Your Own was founded in March of 2012. Storytellers volunteer prior to the event and are judged by three audience members to determine a winner, whose story is guaranteed for radio production.  Winners subsequently choose the next month’s theme.

As a pop-up organization, our events rotate and put previously unknown, underutilized and private spaces on the public map. Each event takes on the character of its environment; the success of the night is as much about the tone that is set as it is about the stories that are told.

Bring Your Own serves as a hub and community for writers, filmmakers, radio makers and photographers where everyone leaves their premiere artistry behind and dives into a medium that lies at the core of everyone’s art forms.  Whether you ask a screen writer, a reporter or a photojournalist, the piece at the heart of each of these crafts is a good story.

Bring Your Own is a production of Laine Kaplan-Levenson.