The Kitchen Sisters
US National Public Radio radio producers
The Kitchen Sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who are National Public Radio radio producers in the United States.
Career
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.
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.
The public source identifies “The Kitchen Sisters” as uS National Public Radio radio producers. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kitchen, Sisters and National.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7744770. VIAF identifies the subject as 125594560. The Library of Congress control number is n88127939. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Kitchen Sisters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.