Turn off Motion

Applications to perform at the 2025 NW Folklife Festival are now open!

Vendor applications will be coming soon.

The deadline for artist applications is January 9th, 2025.

54th Annual Northwest Folklife Festival, May 23-26, 2025

We're excited to announce this year's 2025 Cultural Focus, IKIGAI! 


Ikigai
sees us turning a corner in our 5-part cultural focus adventure.  The last 3 years have explored themes that ask us to look inside ourselves, investigating our ability to change, find balance, and identify the things that make us tick.  Metamorphosis, Lagom, and Meraki offer us a process to understand our place in a rapidly changing world. A world that often distracts and overworks us, can invigorate and boost us, continues to confuse and amaze us, and generally leaves us overwhelmed with emotions, with very little time for rest and reflection.  

With Ikigai, we explore the concept of Purpose.  In a western context, we often define purpose in relationship to our career and our professional capacity.  But when you break down the world, there are two parts to Ikigai:  “Iki” which means “life”, and “Gai” which means “worth living”.  In this sense, purpose isn’t relegated simply to a person’s purpose in their careers, but rather, to a larger holistic human experience that can be both personal and communal.   As we reflect on the lessons learned from Metamorphosis, Lagom, and Meraki, Ikigai gives us a way to determine how we can show up as our best, authentic selves in community, and for community. 
With Ikigai, we challenge ourselves to find purpose, embracing both the intimate and the social implications that ask us to show up.  What is your ikigai?

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