If you found yourself wandering the National Mall this summer during the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, you would have seen some familiar faces from the Mason Folklore community. The 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival presented themes on Earth Optimism and the United Arab Emirates. The festival featured cultural practices, arts, food, music, and more on the National Mall, and our students and staff provided well-rounded support at the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival as volunteers, interns, and staff in the areas of operations, programs, marketplace, and media. After finishing the Folklore & Festival class hosted in partnership with the Arts Management program, where students used the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a case study, many students turned their academic experience into real-life experience.
If you followed the Folklife Festival on-line, you may have seen work from Gloria Dai, an Arts Management graduate student from the Folklore and Festival class, who supported various press and media operations. Folklore graduate student, Amanda Ellard, interned with the documentation crew and helped produce work for the online magazine. You may not have seen folklore graduate student William Patterson on the mall this summer, but you certainly noticed how seamlessly the festival appeared on the mall. Because of his work as an operations exhibit worker, guests, participants, and their exhibits were ready for their day with everything they needed. William was integral to behind-the-scenes work at the Folklife Festival past summer. Betty Aquino, folklore graduate student, served as an operations intern where she supported sustainability efforts. The Folklife Festival is known as the “greenest” festival on the National Mall because they not only recycle, but compost as much as possible to help reduce the festivals carbon footprint.
In the Folklife Kitchen, folklore certificate student, Kathryn Casey used her background working in restaurants to support foodways programming as an assistant. She helped prep foods for demonstrations that focused on traditional foods from the United Arab Emirates, recipes that used sustainability meats and vegetables, as well as foods from Indigenous American cultures. Kim Stryker, instructor in the Folklore Program, donned a different hat at the Festival in the Earth Optimism exhibit. She led games for children and families that helped them understand what they can do to be better environmental stewards of the land they live on. Caitlin Gumb, an Arts Management graduate student who also participated in the Folklore and Festival class, greeted guests with a friendly smile and shared a wealth of knowledge about the artisanal and fair-trade pieces for purchases in the marketplace.
We are thrilled that so many of our students got hands-on experience at one of the largest folklife and cultural festivals in the country this summer. If you’re interested in taking the Folklore & Festival class, it will be offered again in Spring 2023!