Festival Highlights
For more than 25 years, the Spirit & Place Festival has served as a platform for one-of-a-kind events and performances. We invite you to explore and celebrate our history!Notable Festival Moments
2024: GRATITUDE
The 2024 Spirit & Place Festival witnessed interfaith, cross-cultural, and intergenerational sharing. The performing and visual arts were on spectacular display and thoughtful conversations rooted in great literature, film, and history were deeply felt. Our closing Public Conversation brought together psychology researcher Dacher Keltner and local creator of The Testimony Service, Ebony Chappel. Author and playwright R. Eric Thomas moderated a deeply intentional conversation that wove together reflections on awe, community, vulnerability, wonder, and, of course, gratitude. Shamira Wilson’s Synaptic Array was also proudly unveiled at the event. This new artwork was commissioned by Spirit & Place and made possible in part by Noblesville Creative and the Indiana Arts Commission, which receives support from the State of Indiana and the National Endowment for the Arts, funding also allowed us to create an audio description of the artwork, making it more accessible to those with vision impairments. Click here to listen.
Photo Credit: Liz Kaye/Indiana University
2023: NOURISH
Everything living needs nourishment, but we humans are a little different from other animals. We need nature’s bounty as they do, but we also need music. And dance. And poetry, literature, faith, art, stories, and each other. In 2023 the Spirit & Place Festival explored the NOURISH theme through interfaith and cross-cultural meals, meditative practices rooted in different religious traditions, Native American connections to food and language, interactive theater pieces on nourishing loved ones during times of loss, musical performances ranging from a hymn sing-a-long to a classical musical concert, outdoor wanderings, and even “buzzy” art-making. In a first ever occurrence, the Spirit & Place Festival Public Conversation was hosted as a live audience podcast for the Black Girl Eating podcast with culinary historian Michael Twitty.
2022: Identify
How we IDENTIFY and talk about ourselves, our communities, spiritual practices, artistic practices, and more frames how we walk in the world. Identifying one way or another expresses core and foundational aspects of our very being. Using the arts, humanities, and religion, Spirit & Place and its Central Indiana community partners explored the ideas, values, creative expressions, places, and spaces that shape who we are. Thanks to the keen eye of community advocate and photographer Wildstyle Paschall, we were even able to document the joy and vibrancy of community spaces that welcome people to identify as their whole selves! View the exhibit here.
2021: Change
2020 changed everything. We – and the world – feel changed. This change has been exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying, liberating, needed, and not enough all at once. The 2021 festival featured events dealing with change and . . . climate, religion, “truthsgiving,” ethics, Butoh dance, neighborhoods, education, and so much more. The Public Conversation featured Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, Leah Gunning Francis, author of Faith and Ferguson and Faith After Ferguson. Our opening night event witnessed the debut of a new jazz piano piece, “The Road,” by Christopher Pitts who was inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s eponymous novel as well as the changes we humans have collectively experienced during the pandemic.
2020: Origins
Amidst a global pandemic and worldwide protests against police brutality, the Spirit & Place Festival boasted 25 virtual and hybrid events that connected audiences far and wide and included the debut of “A Brave Attempt,” a commissioned work by poet and activist Manon Voice who not only debuted a new poem, but served as emcee to our first-ever virtual Opening Night Kick-off, and joined Irish poet and theologian Padraig O’Tuama in conversation to close the festival during its annual Public Conversation.
2019: R/Evolution
The Latin revolutio and evolutio are separated by a single letter. The first means “a turn around,” implying swift or abrupt transition. The second means an “unrolling,” or “opening,” suggesting gradual transformation or blooming. Regardless, it’s all about change and in 2019 we invited the community to explore the nature of R/Evolution. Spirit & Place did so by inviting Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project,” to serve as our Public Conversation speaker.
2018: Intersection
In 2018 we encouraged reflection on INTERSECTION as the place and space where the but, or, and, also, between, either, and other meets. The Public Conversation featured Zeynep Tufekci, techno-sociologist and author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.
Want to check out ALL our past festival awesomeness?! Scroll to the bottom to learn about all our past Public Conversation speakers, events, and Award of Awesomeness winners.
