Seems like you just want a global variable that is shared between two cells? current_items = None def generate_numbers(): global current_items

Seems like you just want a global variable that is shared between two cells? current_items = None def generate_numbers(): global current_items items = [] current_items = items while True: items.append(my_item) return items def view_current_plot(): plot(current_items) Note that you probably want to run `generate_numbers()` in a different thread or a different async coroutine so the Jupyter kernel would not block for the duration of it.