The International Festival of Arts & Ideas announced its main schedule of free and ticketed events for the 2026 festival that takes place in New Haven in May and June.
As has been the case with the festival for most of its 30-year history, the bulk of the events happen from mid- to late June, including free concerts on the New Haven Green. This year, the festival has a general theme of “Home and Belonging.”
The free concerts on the New Haven Green include the funk/soul/fusion ensemble Matt Kampe and the Hub, as well as the Cuban funk artist Cimafunk with La Tribu on June 26, a New Haven Symphony Orchestra “American Icons” concert where vocalists Capathia Jenkins and Ryan Shaw pay tribute to famous jazz and pop singers on June 27 and the annual “Escape to the Islands” New Haven Caribbean Heritage Festival on June 28.
Ticketed music events include Yale Choral Artists on June 20 at Sprague Memorial Hall at Yale University and the jazz vocalist Somi (aka Somi Kokoma) on June 25 at the Yale University Theatre. Somi, whose parents are from Rwanda and Uganda, made her latest album “Zenzile” a tribute to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.
A key dance event at the festival is the internationally renowned Connecticut-based dance/movement troupe Pilobolus with their “Other Worlds” shows on June 18 at the Shubert Theatre. The show is drawn from Pilobolus’ ongoing “Other Worlds Collection” project where each show consists of several pieces from a repertoire of over 20 short works loosely themed as “the spaces we inhabit — from the realms within ourselves, society and the universe.”
Another ticketed dance/theater performance is The Mercy Velvet Project, a long-gestating dance concert/rock opera inspired by an obscure album recorded in Rhode Island in 1999. The piece, created by the local troupe kamrDANCE with choreographer Alexis Robbins (whose father was the drama on that inspirational album, “Live in Vain” by Mercy Velvet), had public performances while it was still a work-in-progress, but the Arts & Ideas performances on June 26 and 27 at the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Black Box space on Wall Street in New Haven are being called its premiere.
Local playwright/librettist Aaron Jafferis and composers Dahlak Brathwaite and DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain) are presenting a work-in-progress performance of “Bad Baby,” a multicultural, musical genre-mixing piece about fatherhood, on June 24 at the Yale University Theatre.
“Skeleton Canoe” by the Seattle, Washington-based All My Relations Collective has two performances on June 19 and 20. The collective does work based on indigenous cultures using diverse theatrical techniques including puppetry and tech design.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, will be part of a public conversation about migration and cultural identity following a June 17 screening at Yale’s Humanities Quadrangle of the 2024 film “Cabrini” based on the life of 19th century Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini.
The festival will also be celebrating the Juneteenth holiday again with its annual Juneteenth Jamboree on June 19 and a Juneteenth Village and Marketplace on June 20.
The “Selected Shorts” radio show and podcast will visit the festival on its latest live tour, June 21 at the Yale University Theatre. The show presents professional actors, including some who are very well-known, reciting works of short fiction. The pieces range from classics to new writings. Each episode or performance usually has a theme, and the June 21 New Haven show will apparently fit with the Arts & Ideas’ overall theme of “Home and Belonging.”
Arts & Ideas has a tradition of holding events related to the National Endowment for the Arts’ literacy-minded Big Read program. There are 18 separate events on the Arts & Ideas schedule connected to this year’s NEA Big Read book, “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros. On June 28, Cisneros will make a virtual appearance during a live discussion of her work at the New Haven Museum.
The Ideas side of Arts & Ideas consists of over a dozen talks or panel discussions. One of them, “Democracy Under Pressure: What History Tells Us” features a panel of Yale history professors: Elizabeth Hinton, author of “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s”; Joanne B. Freeman, author of “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War”; and Beverly Gage, whose biography “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” won the Pulitzer Prize.
This year’s Ideas events are divided into four day-long blocks of programming: “America 250: Democracy at a Crossroads” on June 7, “Nothing Wasted: Sustainable Kitchens and Thriving Oceans” on June 14, “Queens of the Culture: Women Who Made Hip-Hop” on June 21 and “Voices and Belonging: A Day of Literature and Identity” on June 28. One of the “Queens of the Cuture” events is a talk with former Def Jam and Arista records A&R executive Drew Dixon.
The festival is known for setting up walking tours and bike tours highlighting New Haven culture and history. Among the areas receiving tours this year are Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on June 7, a Regional Water Authority treatment facility on June 9, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station on June 12, “New Haven’s Closet: 400 Years of Queer History in the Elm City” on June 21 and “Style and Power Demystified: Civic Architecture on and Around the New Haven Green” on June 28, among others.
Before the main downtown festival starts in June, Arts & Ideas holds neighborhood festivals in other parts of New Haven. The Fair Haven festival day is May 2, the Hill neighborhood has its on May 16, the combined Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills neighborhood festival is May 17, West Rock and West Hills are celebrated on May 30 and the Newhallville festival is on May 31. Arts & Ideas also supports and promotes the longstanding African American community parade and related gatherings of Elm City Freddy Fixer Weekend, June 5-7.
Arts & Ideas has been undergoing a leadership transition for the past couple of years. Shelley Quiala, who became the festival’s executive director in 2020, stepped down in 2024 to spend more time with her family in Minnesota. Quiala stayed connected to Arts & Ideas as an advisor last year but is no longer serving in that capacity. Longtime Arts & Ideas board member Rev. Kevin Ewing served as the interim artistic director for the 2025 festival but made it clear that he would not be continuing in that role this year. The Arts & Ideas organization confirmed in January that it was engaged in a national search for a new executive director. The festival’s managing director Melissa Huber has been with Arts & Ideas in various capacities since 2003, and worked with a specially formed interim management team to organize the 2026 festival.
According to Huber, the Arts & Ideas team was very collaborative in developing the program this year, “utilizing numerous strengths and expertise within the staff. But we also hired a program lead, Thérèse LaGamma, who programmed the ticketed and New Haven Green programming. Shannon Miller, who has been in our community impact department for a number of years became the community impact manager when Sha McAllister left the festival last fall, and Tiffany Hopkins, also a long-time festival employee curated the Ideas programming this year.”
The complete schedule for the 2026 International Festival of Arts & Ideas can be found on the festival’s website at artidea.org.
