- Metamorphosis 2022
- Lagom 2023
- Meraki 2024
- Ikigai 2025
- Ubuntu 2026
We're excited to announce this year's 2025 Cultural Focus, IKIGAI!
Pronounced: Ee-kee-guy
The concept of Ikigai marks the next phase in our cultural focus exploration that began by looking inward at our personal growth. Over the past three years, these themes-- Metamorphosis, Lagom, and Meraki, which explore change, balance, and passion--helped us understand our role in a fast-changing world, often overwhelmed with distractions and demands.
Derived from the Japanese words "Iki" (life) and "Gai" (worth living), Ikigai invites us to embrace an intuitive journey, one that encourages us to navigate life’s complexities and, eventually, challenging us to find and embrace our true purpose, considering both intimate and social dimensions of life. It's about showing up authentically, trusting the process, and allowing your purpose to come into view, often when you least expect it.
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!
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.
Poster Artists
Toka Valu
Toka Valu is an indigenous Pacific Islander Artist and Illustrator with more than five years of Public Arts experience, and over twenty years of illustration & visual arts work. His artistic influences are culturally rooted and informed by his cultural upbringing in Tonga and cultivated by the Duwamish lands that he now calls home in the Pacific NW.
Toka’s practice integrates both his Tongan cultural upbringing and his transformative experience in the Pacific Northwest to establish a unique and bold artistry. As a multifaceted creative, his work aims to illuminate the unseen connections in our relationships and the resulting dynamics of these ties. Using a variety of applications, Toka’s work is contemporary in its interpretation and grounded in traditional Pasifika and Tongan aesthetic.
King Khazm
King Khazm is an emcee, visual artist, producer and community organizer who has become a prominent figure in the Hip-Hop community within Seattle and around the world. His work to engage and empower communities is demonstrated through over 25 years of music, art and community service.
Khazm serves as a board member of paralysis support organization The Here & Now Project, board member of King County arts funding agency 4Culture, manager of the historic venue Washington Hall and executive director of Hip Hop community organization 206 Zulu.