Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: The Ella Project
Ashlye Keaton and Gene Meneray, founders of the Ella Project, photo by Ellis Anderson
November 2025For two decades this pro bono legal advocacy group has been helping Crescent City creatives navigate the business world—and it’s paying off.
– by Doug Brantley
This column is underwritten in part by Lucy Burnett
New Orleans’ creative culture is big business. From the buskers lining Royal Street to the artists encircling Jackson Square to the vibrant second lines and impromptu parades that bubble up from the streets—it’s what we do and do well.
But while the city has churned out generation after generation of award-winning artists, writers, and musicians, New Orleans creatives’ business culture has, historically, been less than laudable.
“I worked with a lot of legacy artists,” says entertainment lawyer Ashlye Keaton of the private practice she started in the early aughts, soon after graduating from Tulane Law School.
“It was just heartbreaking to see these music icons who would come into the office, older musicians who had just been completely screwed over by terrible contracts. It was like, ‘If only I could go back in time and work with you before you signed that bad deal.’”
The State of New Orleans Culture 20 Years After Katrina Panel at the Jazz Museum, August 2025, photo courtesy the Ella Project
So, she set out to do just that, joining forces with Gene Meneray, who Keaton met while interning at the Arts Council of New Orleans, where Meneray served as director of artist services for more than a decade. In 2004, the duo cofounded The Ella Project, in partnership with the Arts Council, Tulane, and the now-defunct Tipitina’s Foundation.
“We knew there was a great need for people to protect their intellectual property,” says Meneray. “And the only way to do that was to give them direct legal representation. The problem was, of course, for the individual independent artist, it was too pricey.”
An acronym for Entertainment Law Legal Assistance, The Ella Project was designed to provide proactive, pro bono legal work for low- to moderate-income artists, musicians and related non-profits.
Working out of her office with Tulane law students (who receive credit for their time), Keaton would devote half-days on Fridays assisting clients on matters ranging from copyright and trademark issues to contract drafting and licensing agreements.
Within a year, half-day Fridays morphed into full-day Fridays, and Keaton’s part-time public service soon overshadowed her private practice. Enter the philanthropic Ford Foundation, which funded the Project post-Katrina to expand its efforts even further.
Today, housed within the New Orleans Jazz Museum, Keaton and Meneray work fulltime for the now-501(c)(3) organization, which mentors more than 250 clients one-on-one each year.
Gene Meneray and Ashlye Keaton talking to WWOZ 90.7 at Jazz Fest 2025, photo courtesy the Ella Project
The Project has also grown to include close to 20 free arts law- and business-focused workshops annually, as well as a patent assistance program geared to budding inventors in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
“If you don’t have your business in order, then you risk losing control of your work, your creative content,” notes Keaton. “And if you’re constantly in an adversarial mode, you’re not in a place where the creative process is going to be working for you.
“But if you have your business in order, odds are you are going to create more content. And that’s going to generate more beauty and joy, not just for the individual to work with, but ultimately for the entire New Orleans cultural ecosystem.”
Take Keaton’s early work with Creole Wild West Big Chief Howard Miller (who also heads the Ella Project’s board of directors) in helping him and other Mardi Gras Indians establish copyright protection for their elaborate, one-of-a-kind suits as registered works of sculpture.
“That’s the biggest thing,” she says, “controlling your creative content, whether you’re engaging in the online marketplace or selling paintings on Jackson Square or performing at the Blue Nile or on a national tour selling records.
“Whatever the case may be, you want to make sure you are transacting in a way that is most beneficial to you.”
Keaton and Meneray also worked closely with the city on establishing the Office of Nighttime Economy, which acts as a liaison between local government and the cultural community and as an advocate for hospitality workers.
An outgrowth of that partnership was the 2024 New Orleans Music Census, an anonymous survey of more than 150 local musicians, which led to the implementation of the Ella Project’s current public seminar series, Music Census Sessions Live.
“The results of the census showed a real need for professional development,” notes Meneray. “Dealing with publishers, dealing with contractors, access to more learning opportunities.”
Best Musician’s Resource Award, OffBeat Best of the Beat 2017. Photo by OffBeat Magazine
The ongoing, yearlong Census Sessions series (which takes place both in-person and via Zoom and is archived on the Project’s website) couples local performers, such as Shamarr Allen, Bo Dollis Jr. (The Wild Magnolias), Lou Hill (Water Seed) and Jeremy Kelley (Bon Bon Vivant), with industry insiders and legal experts on topics ranging from creating marketing plans to career sustainability.
“I love working with young artists who really want to get to know the business as they’re getting into their careers and building catalogs of content,” says Keaton.
“Back when we started this, it was a lot of rudimentary issues. But now people are coming to me with complex negotiation strategies, and it’s something I really enjoy. Because it tells me that they are excited about learning and more motivated to take control of and prioritize their business.”
But it’s not just emerging talents the Ella Project is targeted to. In early 2026, the Project will release its first in-depth publication, Rampart: Artist Readiness & Legacy Building, a musician-focused guide to estate planning.
“People don’t necessarily want to go to a workshop to talk about their inevitable death,” says Meneray. “So, we created a really strong guide that will be available when you are ready.
“It goes through all the different things you would need to do to set up your will, to make sure your heirs have access to your passwords, to let people know where your contracts are.”
He also sees Rampart as a preparedness tool in the case of disaster, harking back to the invaluable master recordings and film stock lost in the wake of Katrina and lessons learned during the pandemic, that is applicable to artists everywhere.
“We have this creative industry, and this creative industry is really important as an economic revenue generator,” Keaton says. “But then you also have the cultural ecosystem, and while you can make distinctions between the two, they often overlap.
“For all the transactions that we’re working on with individual clients, when you look at it from a cumulative perspective, it’s impactful across the entire community.
“Our artists and our culture bearers and our musicians are the lifeblood of our city. They are what makes it so attractive, what makes New Orleans so special.”
Gene Meneray and Ashlye Keaton, founders of the Ella Project at the Jazz Museum, photo by Ellis Anderson
