Northwest Folklife Festival

The Northwest Folklife Festival is a vibrant, multicultural celebration of music, dance, and art held annually over Memorial Day weekend at Seattle Center. It showcases diverse performances, hands-on workshops, and craft vendors, bringing together artists and communities from across the Pacific Northwest. With its lively atmosphere and free admission, the festival is a beloved tradition.

From music and dance performances to food vendors to family hands-on activities, the Northwest Folklife Festival has something to offer to everyone. In our last 2 festivals, we’ve introduced a few new ingredients, including:

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.

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.

Our Kuleana Corridor is an 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.

Our Window Gallery is part one of a larger mission to include more visual arts components to the festival. We hope to elevate the work of artists of all disciplines around our region, and will work to add more gallery spaces to the festival grounds.