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Applications to perform at the 2025 NW Folklife Festival are coming soon! Email programming@nwfolklife.org to be added to our email list.

53rd Annual Northwest Folklife Festival, May 24-27, 2024

We're excited to announce that the 2024 Cultural Focus is Meraki.

Meraki marks the 3rd chapter of our 5-year Cultural Focus storyline. Meraki derives from the Greek language and means doing something with passion, soul, and love. In 2022, our first in-person festival out of the pandemic, Metamorphosis asked that we accept and welcome change and transformation as a natural part of our everyday folk lives. In 2023, Lagom compelled us to accept change as part of a journey towards finding a new balance within ourselves, our communities, and our larger ecosystem. From that place of balance, Meraki urges us to seek that which gives us joy, so that whatever we put our minds to can be approached and accomplished with a sense of pride, soulfulness, and discipline. 

We look forward to this year's festival and can't wait to see you there!

READ ONLINE PROGRAM GUIDE HERE! 

Creative Ecosystems Summit


Northwest Folklife presents Laulima: the first Annual Creative Ecosystems Summit. This assembly brings together an amalgam of creative constituents to discuss tools, strategies and collaborations for building a resilient and prosperous creative ecosystem. Invitations will go to teachers, students, emerging professionals, industry leaders, culture bearers and policymakers.

Read More!



Threads of the People

Threads of the People is our take on a fashion show, featuring a mix of runway shows, workshops and demos, vendor booths, displays and material swaps. This new addition to the festival will explore fashion as a folk art, the ways in which fashion and culture are interwoven, and seek to bring fashion back to its roots - when our clothing was created in homes, by hand, and from materials found in our natural environment.
Read More or Apply!

Kuleana Corridor

NW Folklife’s exploration of the Folk vocation, bringing the people, communities, organizations, and cooperatives who are actively engaging in techniques that promote bio- diversity, support sustainable & healthy food production, and give strength to the cause of food justice, security, and sovereignty.
Read more or Apply!

The Maker’s Space

The Maker’s Space is designed to showcase and give hands-on demonstrations of the wide world of craft. We want to encourage and instill a sense of wonder and imagination in our own creative imaginings and curiosities.
Read more or Apply!

Community Quilt

Northwest Folklife will be celebrating the folk art of quilting at the 2024 Northwest Folklife Festival. We will be soliciting 15” quilt blocks from the community to be displayed at the 2024 Northwest Folklife festival. After the festival, the blocks will be sewn into a community quilt. 

Learn More

Poster Artists

Raven Juarez

I use my work to talk to myself, to untangle intangible ideas, and find truth in experiences that once left me feeling confused, or unseen, or out of place. The stories I tell myself, the memories I relive, the dreams I work back into reality, have become my identity. 

As a mixed-race young woman of indigenous heritage in America today, feeling truth in my identity is a sacred gift to myself. I believe in the unifying power of symbolic storytelling, and by offering vulnerable and intimate perspectives of my own experience, I hope to speak to the softest and buried truths of my audiences. 

In words unspoken, my stories illuminate the intrinsic connections we share as co- inhabitants of the physical world and the ties between the private worlds we each hold within.

www.ravenjuarez.com

Eli Lara

Finding inspiration in the energy of the living psyche, Eli Lara is interested in capturing the forms and figures of the natural world in a tactile, visceral manner. He paints in a gestural and spontaneous fashion, capturing the emotions and movements of the living form, melding the experience of both the subject and the observer He graduated in 2013 from the University of Washington School of Art with a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts. He currently lives and works out of the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Pioneer Square.

www.elinotlara.com/