Events to be Held in Communities Across the US April 14–28, 2025

What do a mural project honoring childhood immigration, a walking tour of Denver’s Vietnamese community, a public event engaging with local history through the lens of a cemetery, and a celebration of Georgia’s Indigenous communities all have in common? They are just some of the events in the exciting lineup for the National Humanities Center’s second annual Being Human Festival (US).

Building on the success of last year’s inaugural effort, this year’s festival will include events in sixteen locations across the country. These community-focused events, organized and presented by local artists, scholars, and educators, highlight the incredible breadth of the humanities and demonstrate the innumerable ways that they add depth and meaning to our daily lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us.

“We are excited to partner with all of the researchers and organizations involved in this year’s festival to present a range of events that explore the ways the humanities help us understand and appreciate the world around us,” said J. Porter Durham, interim president and director of the National Humanities Center. “This year’s festival, which is organized around the notion of ‘landmarks,’ is nearly double the size of our inaugural festival in 2024, with 16 events in 12 states. The fascinating variety of events, topics, and forms of these events are a testament to the ways that the humanities add depth and meaning to our lives in the communities where we live.”

Inspired by and undertaken in partnership with the United Kingdom’s Being Human Festival, which originated in 2014, the US edition of the festival was the latest international expansion of the Being Human effort. Previous Being Human Festival events have taken place in France, Italy, Romania, and Singapore. In 2017, a sister festival was established in Melbourne, Australia.

Events in this year’s Being Human Festival (US) were selected from a wide variety of proposals submitted to the National Humanities Center. Organizers of those events will receive grants from the Center.

2025 Being Human Festival (US) Organizers and Events

Community	Organizer	Event
Cane Hill and Dutch Mills, AR	Historic Cane Hill; University of Arkansas at Fayetteville	History Passport: Reconnecting German Settlers and their Arkansas Neighbors
Los Angeles, CA	Fowler Museum of UCLA	What is a Landmark? Food, Storytelling, Music and Cartonera Construction with the Cartonera Santanera Collective
Denver, CO	Regis University’s Center for the Study of War Experience; The Far East Center; Historic Denver	Denver’s Little Saigon: A Landmark History
Miami, FL	Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab-Florida International University (WPHL-FIU); Iris PhotoCollective; IPC ArtSpace; iWitness: IPC Institute for Visual Journalism	I Am Little Haiti: A Global Borderless Caribbean Homecoming
St. Petersburg, FL	Florida Humanities; Sacred Lands Preservation and Education; Heritage Village	Echoes of the Land: Hurricanes, History, and Storytelling
St. Petersburg, FL	Cultured Books Literacy Foundation	Poetry on the Deuces
Macon, GA	Georgia Humanities; Middle Georgia State University; Ocmulgee Mounds Association; Georgia Council for the Arts	Ocmulgee Rising: A Celebration of Muscogee Creativity with Joy Harjo
Lawrence, KS	University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities; The Commons; Spencer Museum of Art; Lawrence Public Library	Obscured Landmarks: Re-activating Buried Histories, Stewarding Sites for Learning in Lawrence, Kansas
Detroit, MI	Detroit River Story Lab at the University of Michigan, Detroit; Wayne County Port Authority	River People: A Being Human Festival Encounter Space on the Detroit River
Detroit, MI	Wayne State University Humanities Center; Belle Isle Conservancy; Wayne State University Department of Urban Studies and Planning	Stories of Detroit’s Crown Jewel: Different Facets of Being Human at Belle Isle Park
Minneapolis, MN	Felicia Cooper with In the Heart of the Beast Theater	The Agency for Tiny Tourism
St. Louis, MO	University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL)	Landmarks of the Mind: Mapping Neurodiversity through Creative Expression
Princeton, NJ	Humanities Council for Princeton, Princeton University; Princeton French Film Festival; GradFUTURES, Princeton University; Princeton Public Library; Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES), Princeton University; Trenton Arts at Princeton (TAP), Princeton University	Centennial Landmarks of Literature and Cinema in Princeton
New York, NY	Department of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College; Baruch College Immigrant Student Success	The US Childhood Arrivals Mural Project
Utica, NY	Forest Hill Cemetery Preservation Foundation	Forest Hill Cemetery: A Landmark of Memory and Design
Chapel Hill, NC	Carolina Public Humanities; The Carolina Biodiversity Collaborative	Humanities Out of Doors

About the National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center is the world’s only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. Through its residential fellowship program, the Center provides scholars with the resources necessary to generate new knowledge and to further understanding of all forms of cultural expression, social interaction, and human thought. Through its education programs, the Center strengthens teaching on the collegiate and pre-collegiate levels. Through public engagement intimately linked to its scholarly and educational programs, the Center promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.

Contact

Don Solomon
Director of Communications
919.406.0120