LIFT and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation invite you to join for a day of dialogue and networking with festival directors, producers, theatre makers, artists and policy makers to explore these questions. With contributions from artists, international festival directors and senior policy makers including Jude Kelly, Stefan Kaegi and Tim Etchells. The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the number and popularity of arts festivals in the UK. No longer is the UK arts festival calendar solely dominated by Edinburgh: from Spring to Autumn there are now increasingly popular grass roots festivals that celebrate local culture, large-scale music festivals that include theatre and dance programmes, new city-wide festivals that promote place-making and civic identity and mainstream cultural institutions wrapping up their existing programme within a festival format. And in addition we are also witnessing the rise of a new type of arts festival led and programmed by artists. Many of these festivals emerged and grew in the economic boom of the last decade, fuelled by public sector spending, corporate sponsorship and the disposable income of audiences. Now, in different economic times, how many will survive? What strategies will festival organisers need to adopt to make themselves more sustainable? Are there now opportunities for new, more collaborative festival models? What unique role do festivals play in the development of an artist’s career? Read more here