Found Festival 2026 Artist Call

What is Found Festival, anyway?

We take art out of conventional venues directly into the community. Found Festival celebrates art of all kinds: theatre, dance, film, poetry, music, sound art, installation art, endurance art…if it’s art created for unconventional spaces that challenges the artist/audience relationship, there’s a home for it in Found Festival.

Found Festival is for you, exactly as you are. No matter who you are, what you look like, how or who you love, where you’re from, how you got here, how you identify, how or if you honour whatever higher power, how you move through this world – you belong here. What matters to us is that you feel welcome.

We’re planning four days of Found Festival magic July 9-12, 2026.

Artist call closes December 5, 2025.

There’s no limit to what’s possible at Found 2026. We welcome pitches of all genres/disciplines and stages of development. For inspiration, here are a few things our curation team have in mind for 2026:

• works that have undergone some development/have a history of production
• projects that have an interactive component
• projects with specific desired locations in Old Strathcona (a particular business, park, etc.)

Selected projects will receive an artist fee, production equipment and labour scaled to project needs, Festival infrastructure (marketing, box office, event management), and access to our staff’s experience and knowledge around site-specific art.

---

New this year, Found Festival is considering project applications for the 2027 Festival as well as 2026. We want each Found project to be as supported as possible, so this is to provide a longer lead-up time to a festival presentation, allowing for more project and fund development.

Projects in consideration for 2027 may either receive a formal offer to confirm their presentation OR a letter of interest and offer of in-kind support to aid the artist in pursuing further funding to develop the project in consideration for future Found Festivals

Applications are now open, find out more about festival opportunities below!