Our Fall and Spring Festivals explore big questions and timely themes.
Festival programs bring people together to explore ideas that go beyond their personal experiences, enabling them to live more empathetic and connected lives.
Over the course of CHF’s 30+ year history, we have grown from a one-day celebration of the humanities into a year-round festival of arts and ideas. Our annual events take place in venues across the Chicago area (from Evanston to Englewood, the Loop to the South Shore), including two festivals (Fall Festival, Spring Festival).
Our partners include the region’s most prestigious cultural institutions and universities. Our events feature thinkers at the heart of contemporary civic and cultural conversations, including authors, artists, journalists, policy makers, and others shaping our understanding of the moment, the past, and the future. Festival programs leave you with thoughtful insights and compelling questions, and often feature Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Oscar, Grammy, and Tony award winners.
Our hope is that audiences leave Festival programs transformed—inspired by a shared experience and with new insights and perspectives.
We embrace the complexity of our themes with relevant, provocative, and sometimes unexpected programs.
Think of us as your cultural playlist, capturing the current zeitgeist and helping you navigate our cultural moment.
Our programs are curated around thought-provoking themes that reflect our contemporary moment and help audiences navigate our world and the broader human condition. Bringing the full range of the humanities, arts, and social sciences to bear, our theme-driven content allows us to reveal the full complexity of our society—both locally and globally.
Throughout our history we’ve tackled themes at the heart of our civic dialogue—Citizens, Belief, Power—and considered some of the big ideas that make us human (From Freedom to Equality, Home & Away, Peace & War, Love & Marriage, Journeys).
Today, we explore our themes over the course of an entire year, allowing us to surface thematic nuances and narratives that build upon each other over time and provide our audiences with a broader set of insights.