Kitchen Sisters, The

About page: The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) are the producers of two Peabody Award-winning NPR series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project, the duPont-Columbia and James Beard Award-winning series, Hidden Kitchens on NPR’s Morning Edition and the NPR series The Hidden World of Girls {Girls and the Women They Become} hosted by Tina Fey. Their current NPR series, The Keepers — stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians — is heard on Morning Edition. The Keepers Specials, now airing on public radio stations nationwide, are hosted by Academy Award-winning actor Frances McDormand. Their Webby Award-winning podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present… is part of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX. Their first book, Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes and More From NPR’s Kitchen Sisters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Kitchen Sisters were the recipient of the 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from The Society of American Archivists and a lifetime achievement award from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

The Kitchen Sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who are National Public Radio radio producers in the United States.

Nelson and Silva met in 1979, in Santa Cruz, California. Silva was curating museum exhibits about local history, and Nelson was recording oral histories for KUSP. They began doing a weekly radio show together about California regional culture. While Silva also works as a museum curator, and Nelson as a casting director, they have collaborated as radio producers ever since meeting. Their name comes from two eccentric brothers, Kenneth and Raymond Kitchen, who were stonemasons in Santa Cruz in the 1940s. The Kitchen Brothers were the subjects of one of Nelson and Silva's first radio pieces.[1]

The Kitchen Sisters have produced over 200 stories for public broadcast. They chronicle hidden bits of history and subjects who have shaped the diverse cultural landscape. Their work includes Lost & Found Sound, narrated by Francis Ford Coppola, the Sonic Memorial Project, narrated by Paul Auster, Waiting for Joe DiMaggio, WHER: The First All-Girl Radio Station in the Nation, the Hidden Kitchens series, Hidden Kitchens Texas, an hour long nationwide broadcast special narrated by Willie Nelson and Robin Wright, and The Hidden World of Girls series. They currently produce the podcast The Kitchen Sisters Present for Radiotopia ...