Festival management class puts students at the heart of cultural conservation and celebration in Washington, D.C.

If you visit the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the last week of June, you’ll be greeted with the sights and sounds of a multicultural celebration at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Music and dance performances, cooking demonstrations, hands-on workshops, and education sessions: Every tent offers a view of the world from a different cultural perspective.

And for George Mason University students in the cross-listed Folklore and Festival Management course, it’s the internship opportunity of a lifetime. 

Supported by an Office of Student Creative Activities and Research Curriculum Impact Grant and led by Lisa Gilman, professor of folklore and English, Karalee Dawn MacKay, director of the arts management program, and Carole Rosenstein, professor of arts management, the course gives students hands-on, real-world experience in festival management.

Along with a term-length group project to plan their own festival, students also learn from guest speakers from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH), tour the CFCH offices, and complete applications for summer internships with the CFCH Folklife Festival.

Recently, the George Mason team established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Smithsonian Institution to formalize the partnership.

“The Folklife Festival is an international, national, and local event: a confluence you’re only going to get in Washington, D.C., where every neighborhood and community is a mix of international, national, and local,” explained Rosenstein. “Being able to leverage the connections of our George Mason faculty to national agencies and institutions all over the region gives our students unique opportunities that will set them up for success.”

“We want the folklore and arts management fields to mirror the populations we work with,” said Gilman. “Mason has this incredibly diverse student body, and through this course and our MOU we are creating real pathways for these students to work in the arts and culture sector. 

“This course is only one piece of it,” she further explained. “There’s a lot of potential for collaboration around research and education in the future.”

Arts management and folklore studies are both necessary perspectives in producing this kind of large-scale cultural event. But, as Rosenstein noted, the two fields don’t often interact in an academic setting. 

“It’s a unique opportunity for graduate students, in particular,” she said. “As an undergraduate, you know, you’re in classes with a variety of majors all the time. But for graduate students with more focused studies, it’s not often they get to share and learn across areas of expertise. And it’s great career practice, because arts management and folklore professionals will be working together at the same institutions in their careers.”

“We get into deep discussions about how each program would approach these same questions and challenges differently, as well as looking at how we have the same motivations and goals but are perhaps using different terminology or theories,” said MacKay. “It’s amazing to see how much they learn from one another.”

Because of the cross-disciplinary nature of the course, students and faculty engage with all parts of festival production at a much deeper level. Students might consider the theoretical concepts behind ethical and equitable folklore conservation and presentation one day, and the next they’re debating how many bathrooms will be needed for the predicted crowds. 

“That’s one of the amazing things about this course and the focus on planning a festival,” said Rosenstein. “It gives them the opportunity to go all the way from high-level theory to what’s happening on the ground at any given minute of the event.”

Everything in the course comes back to building and sustaining relationships. From vendors to sponsors to performers to guests, students learn how proper festival management leads to long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that support the access and preservation of artistic, creative, and cultural expression. 

“This class opens up folklore and arts management students to so many different career possibilities in the arts and culture,” said MacKay. 

“It’s an important reminder for students that there are all kinds of creative life and expression everywhere you look,” said Rosenstein. “It’s not just in big art museums or symphony orchestras: you can find it in every community.”

This summer, we spoke with three of the students who worked on the Folklife Festival. 

Stephanie Aitken

Master’s student in English with a concentration in Folklore Studies

What are you most excited for about interning with the festival?

Seeing it all come together. We’ve learned so much about it in class, and we’ve heard from so many guests who are directly involved in curating or producing the festival. So seeing it all come together in front of my eyes will be an incredible experience.

I’m not from this area, and I’ve never heard of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival before. Now I’m doing an internship. And I don’t think I would have gotten the internship without this class because of the connections we made to all these people related to the festival. 

How did this course and the internship prepare you for a career in folklore studies?

I feel like public-sector folklore has grown more and more, especially with a more modern awareness of being respectful of cultures, reciprocity when engaging with cultures, particularly those of marginalized groups. So preparing students with those skills and that perspective is really valuable, and the opportunities it provides makes George Mason’s folklore program unique. 

Chris Esswein

BA English and Economics ’24

What was your biggest takeaway from the course?

I did a dual degree in economics and English with the hope of going to law school. But there was this looming feeling that I was going to go to law school, end up working for a Big Law firm doing work that I hated, only to burn out and leave after a few years. But this class and the internship opened up a whole new world of opportunity to me. I care deeply about the ethics of representation and public folklore festival management. I could see job possibilities in law at the Smithsonian, or any number of other public or private arts programs. Even in the class, I felt like my practical way of thinking was embraced and encouraged: asking about permits, security, costs, etc. There’s a place for economics and law and the practical in the world of the arts, and maybe there’s nowhere that needs it more than those areas.

Noelani Talamoni

Master’s student in English with a concentration in Folklore Studies

What are you most excited for about interning with the festival?

I’m Indigenous Hawaiian, and although I’m very aware of my culture and my background, I haven’t had the opportunity to really work with people in my community. And because the festival theme this year is Indigenous Voices of America, the internship gives me the opportunity to get closer to a part of my heritage that I hadn’t had before, and a chance to uplift my community. It’s also an opportunity to put my research and my classroom experience to use in a very real, tangible way. 

What was the cross-disciplinary class experience like? 

I feel like we [folklore students and arts management students] learned a lot from each other that we can take into our careers. In our mock festival in class, for example, the arts management students helped me understand these very important, practical aspects of planning, like sound checking for musicians and land use guidelines for where stalls can be placed. And I helped them think through who we were inviting, what communities were being highlighted, how to support unheard voices. Cooperation and camaraderie are a huge part of putting together a festival. In my internship, I’m seeing how experts from multiple fields and backgrounds can work together effectively.