Milton Arceneaux

Milton Arceneaux is a storyteller, filmmaker and four-time global award-winning portrait photographer from Lafayette, Louisiana. His mother grew up speaking French in a French-speaking family. She bought him a ten-dollar Polaroid at a Saturday garage sale and kept a National Geographic subscription in the house so her children would know the world was big and its cultures many. He took her at her word.

He spent eighteen years in Austin, Texas, working his way from juvenile probation officer and letter carrier to a high-level executive career, and backpacked through about eight countries along the way. Then he came home. He and his wife Dawn settled in Grand Coteau, her hometown, so she could open her practice in the parish she came from, and he could put his full attention on his community and on Creole culture.

Cipher Group

Before he came home, he spent nearly five years as an operations executive at a national healthcare company, responsible for budgets, contracts and a team. He wrote and won the $25,000 #CreateLouisiana French Culture Film Grant from the New Orleans Film Society and TV5MONDE, has twice won competitive state grants and has helped nonprofits win grants of their own. Cipher Group puts that work to use for small businesses going after government and corporate contracts.

Louisiana Creole Culture and Creole Culture Day

Louisiana Creole Culture started with a slight. At a French table, someone said his brother-in-law was too dark to be Creole. Milton and his cousin Fernest Broussard, both designers, answered by making their own shirts and setting out to correct the myths, and the organization grew from there with their cousin Alfa Sinegal. Its message is simple: Creole stands on its own. The Creole Culture page he built has passed 81,000 followers without a dollar of paid promotion.

He founded Creole Culture Day, the annual celebration that opens Creole Heritage Month, which held its fifth year in Grand Coteau on October 3, 2026, with a boucherie at dawn, zydeco, genealogy, language and more than a thousand people in attendance. He presented Creole Culture Day and the Creole boucherie at Folk Alliance International in New Orleans, the first time Creole cultural work was presented there.

Film

He co-directed Built On Zydeco with Dustin Cravins, the first zydeco documentary directed by Black Creoles, featuring two-time Grammy winner Terrance Simien, Grammy winner Reginald "Buckwheat Jr." Dural and Keith Frank. The film was funded in part by a $25,000 #CreateLouisiana French Culture Film Grant from the New Orleans Film Society and TV5MONDE and was commended by a Louisiana Senate resolution. It premiered at the 29th New Orleans French Film Festival at the Prytania Theatre, won at the American Golden Picture International Film Festival, and was selected by South Arts for the NEA-supported Southern Circuit Tour. It was an official selection of the 30th Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, an Academy Award-qualifying festival.

The Old Way Still Cuts: A Creole Boucherie, which he directed, produced, wrote, shot and edited, premiered on October 1, 2026 at the Delta Grand in Opelousas. His next film, Parish Okra, follows four Black farmers across four Louisiana parishes.

Photography and books

A four-time Portrait Masters Bronze winner, he has created, curated and hosted three exhibitions: at La Maison Creole de Freetown, Lafayette's first African American history museum, where he also co-led the Freetown Sound Lab oral history project; his solo show Monochrome Roots, Vibrant Rhythms at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, twenty black-and-white portraits of honorees from across the region and five portraits of Black Masking Indians in regalia; and the honoree portraits that opened Creole Heritage Month at Lafayette City Hall, with a proclamation from the city. He is the author of three books on Creole heritage, an ArtSpark Award recipient, and twice a winner of competitive state grants, including the Louisiana Project Grant.

Institutions and service

He is President of Vues de Culture, the Louisiana cultural nonprofit behind the REFRAMING Cinema Film Festival, the first minority-based film festival of its kind in Lafayette, and the Who Yo People oral history archive. He founded Encoded Noire, a creative agency in branding, photography, film and strategy. He serves on the board of the McComb-Veazey Neighborhood Coterie, has served on the board of AOC Community Media, and represents Louisiana Creole Culture on the SWLCA Resilient Future Community Committee, a Tulane and NOAA climate project.