The 2026 Northwest Folklife Festival is just around the corner! We are looking for fiber artists to participate in our Fiber Arts program at this year’s festival, which takes place from May 22-25. Our Fiber Arts program is an arts display consisting of local fiber-made works such as knitting, embroidery, felting, upcycling, etc. Each artist will get a few hours to display their art in the program booth.
Also, there are some updates, in case you participated in Fiber Arts at a past Folklife festival; In response to some of the feedback we have gotten over the years, we have a new location for the Fiber Arts booth. It will be in the Alki Court area, near a newly re-imagined
trad/open air dance area. This space will be a little quieter and separate from the playground-adjacent Makers Space. We believe this will be a better experience for all, and hope that if you haven’t participated in the Fiber Arts booth the last few years, you will consider coming back.
If you are interested in participating in Fiber Arts this year, please fill out an application. For performance type, please select ‘Fiber Arts’. Please let us know if you have any questions as you are completing the application by emailing us at programming@nwfolklife.org. The hours of the Fiber Arts booth will be ~12:30-6:30, and similar to years past, we will schedule two shifts per day. Our application deadline for this program is flexible. Many of our program applications are past due already, but Fiber Artists have until the end of February, contact us if you need more time. Once we get applications in, we will review them and be in touch about scheduling if your application is selected.
This year’s cultural focus of the festival is “Ubuntu” meaning “I am because we are”,the basic translation of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is about belonging. That we belong to each other because our personhood is connected to the personhood of someone else. Some key words we are focusing on this year that represent Ubuntu are; joy, solidarity, and liberation. If you’d like to learn more about this year’s cultural focus you can read about it on our website here:
https://nwfolklife.org/festival/home.html
Feel free to let this inspire you in the art that you create and/or bring to the festival!
-Northwest Folklife Programming Team
