Festival Director-Founding Member

About the Dreams Festival Collective

The Dreams Festival Collective is a peer-governed, decentralized cultural platform launching under Track V of the Global Risks Forum (GRF)—focused on narrative infrastructure, cultural resilience, and the role of imagination in navigating global risk.

Built as a hybrid and cooperative civic network, the Dreams Festival will launch in key Canadian cities and globally linked digital spaces, co-hosted by universities, public institutions, and community partners. The initiative brings together artists, academics, technologists, and cultural workers to co-create annual summer festivals that reimagine how diaspora, public memory, and community-led culture intersect with global challenges—such as climate disruption, forced migration, and systemic collapse.

The Role

As a Founding Member and candidate for Festival Director (Canada Chapter), you will co-create the festival’s organizational structure, cultural vision, and collective governance model. You will lead the Canadian node in shaping both in-person events across cities and virtual programming streams that support cross-border, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

This is a strategic leadership opportunity to direct a new model of arts and cultural governance rooted in:

• Peer production
• Public knowledge
• Diaspora celebration
• Global resilience building

Festival Model (In-Person + Virtual)

The Dreams Festival will operate through hybrid programming streams, including:

Physical Program (Summer Launch Each Year)

• Decentralized events hosted in public spaces, campuses, libraries, and civic venues across Canadian cities
• Community co-curated installations, performances, soundwalks, living archives, climate storytelling, and food/festival rituals
• Collaborations with local artists, diasporic communities, indigenous collectives, and student organizations

Virtual Program (Accessible, Ongoing, Global)

• A year-round platform for virtual exhibitions, academic panels, digital storytelling, and live-streamed artistic interventions
• Virtual residency spaces for artists and researchers focused on climate, migration, memory, or justice
• Online curriculum linked to resilience, sustainability, and civic imagination, designed for transdisciplinary engagement
• A digital “Commons Stage” for panel discussions, public talks, podcast takeovers, and youth-led dialogues

The Canada node will lead the development of a globally interoperable virtual festival layer, allowing contributors from around the world to participate in real time, archive their work, and present through accessible and open formats.

Responsibilities

As Festival Director (Founding Member – Canada), you will:

• Co-develop the collective’s governance and peer-production model, including licensing, attribution, and shared ownership
• Coordinate with universities and civic partners to launch in-person and hybrid festival nodes in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and beyond
• Build a virtual program in collaboration with GRF’s global Track V architecture, including virtual residencies, online exhibitions, and streamed content
• Develop annual festival themes that link culture, identity, and risk to actionable narratives for change
• Support diverse expressions of diaspora experience, indigenous sovereignty, futurist imagination, and ancestral resilience
• Represent the Canadian node in the international steering group guiding the Dreams Festival Global Network

Who Should Apply

We invite candidates who are:

• Enrolled in or recently graduated from relevant graduate programs in arts, culture, humanities, sustainability, or public interest disciplines
• Passionate about using arts and culture as tools for systems change, civic dialogue, and resilience building
• Experienced in curating or producing cultural events—either academic, digital, community-based, or experimental in form
• Skilled in collaborative leadership and excited to co-develop a cooperative infrastructure for decentralized cultural expression
• Fluent in working across virtual and physical platforms, with openness to collective authorship and inclusive governance
• Interested in how digital platforms and public spaces can support a global culture of sustainability and solidarity

Why Join

• Help build a globally networked, simulation-aligned cultural platform under GRF governance
• Co-lead the development of a public arts and knowledge cooperative grounded in justice, memory, and imagination
• Direct the first Canada-based node of a movement that will scale across cities and continents
• Present your work at the Global Risks Forum (GRF) Summit in Geneva, and join a global network of artists, scholars, and public thinkers
• Shape an emerging space where art, academic insight, and civic infrastructure converge to design the cultural future

Application Process

To apply, please submit:

• A 500-word statement of intent outlining your vision for the Dreams Festival (Canada) in both physical and virtual formats
• A CV or creative/academic portfolio showcasing your experience with festivals, installations, performances, publications, or civic projects
• (Optional) A concept brief for a potential theme, partner institution, or digital residency idea

Build the Cultural Infrastructure of the Future

If you believe culture is a tool for collective repair, imagination is a political act, and art must meet risk with vision—

Then join us to shape the Dreams Festival Collective.

Co-create a hybrid civic festival that celebrates diaspora, activates public spaces, and mobilizes cultural memory for global resilience.

Be part of the founding cohort. Lead from Canada. Shape the stories that will shape the future.