Hello and thanks for visiting.

The year 2020 was projected to be a time of celebration for the City of Charleston in its 350th year and, on a different scale, for the Charleston Arts Festival as it presented its fifth iteration.

Instead, the year has proven to be one of catastrophe, challenge, and hopefully positive change. As our world has now evolved into mid-summer, 2020 may well prove to be the year we will all most want to forget. Indeed, bright sides have been few and far between for many of us.

Founded in 2016, Charleston Arts Festival has year after year celebrated diverse and innovative cross-discipline collaboration and has sought to challenge artists and attendees through forward-thinking and inclusive programming.

In each subsequent edition, Charleston Arts Festival has highlighted Lowcountry luminaries working across artistic genres including music, dance, visual arts, poetry, theatre, film and culinary to create four years of multi-event festivals. Throughout our history, attendees have had the opportunity to immerse themselves in singular experiences, which have been drawn from the spectrum of creative fields and endeavors.

With the goal of memorializing our previous four years of innovative creative programming, we have significantly revamped our website and have developed a comprehensive archive of our offerings for season 1-4. We trust that you will be as impressed as we have been by these reminders of the scope of our programming.

Charleston Arts Festival celebrates creators of all ethnicities while seeking to engage, inspire and amaze our audiences. Our vision is not only to support creative collaboration of artists and performers, but to enlighten our community on the profound effects of artistic creation while bridging the gap between artist intention and audience expectation.

Although the effects of the coronavirus pandemic remain with us, Charleston Arts Festival is looking toward new modes of delivery for our programming until we can be live and in person yet again.

We have launched virtually a most timely and meaningful three-part series of readings of race-themed plays in collaboration with PURE Theatre and Buxton Books. Also in the works are other virtual presentations in music and drama as well as PechaKuchas 37 and beyond..

For our festival and our community, the celebration of all things creative remains critical to our shared recovery.

Andrew Walker & Terry Fox