we create ourselves. we create our belonging. we create our freedom.
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Circuit Fest: An Annual Community Event Series
Circuit Fest, named after the Chitlin' Circuit, a touring infrastructure developed by Black musicians and performers during the Jim Crow Era in the American South, is a global open call for Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming (BTGNC) event curators, collectives, and cultural organizers throughout the African Diaspora. Circuit Fest creates an entry point for communities around the world to build relationships with URE through locally rooted cultural programming.
In a world where access to the arts remains deeply gatekept and inequitable, Circuit Fest seeks to bridge gaps in arts access across cultural deserts, including rural communities and underfunded urban areas. By investing directly in local BTGNC artists, curators, and cultural organizers, the program creates opportunities for communities to experience and participate in the arts while building spaces where people can gather, create, and develop a deeper understanding of one another's experiences.
How It Works
Through an annual open call held each January, URE selects BTGNC local collectives and individual curators to produce original events in their communities. Selected producers receive a $1,000 production stipend and retain 95% of event profits, with the remaining 5% reinvested into Circuit Fest to support future programming.
Circuit Fest is an entry point into URE's broader placemaking work, allowing us to build relationships with local organizers, artists, community spaces, and cultural ecosystems.
Through these relationships, Circuit Fest can serve as a pathway toward future participation in programs such as Blue Roots Residency and Shaping Sanctuary, as well as the potential establishment of future URE chapters.
Why Circuit Fest?
The program is intentionally designed to strengthen independent artist infrastructure.
We begin by centering BTGNC creators and organizers, with the long-term goal of expanding access to Queer people of color, communities of color, and eventually independent artists more broadly.
This expansion allows Circuit Fest to grow from a BTGNC cultural infrastructure project into a broader model for addressing inequitable access to and resources for independent arts and cultural production.
Circuit Fest strengthens local creative ecosystems by providing paid opportunities for BTGNC artists and event producers while connecting communities through shared cultural experiences, collaborative storytelling, and community care.
By investing in local curators rather than requiring communities to fit within URE's existing geographic structure, the program allows each place to shape its own expression of culture, creativity, and community.
Our Ask
URE seeks to fund:
2027: 24 affiliated events
2028: 36 affiliated events
2029: 48 affiliated events
2030: 60 affiliated events
This growth will allow URE to progressively expand the number of communities receiving direct investment in independent cultural production while developing a national and international network of artists, curators, venues, organizers, and community spaces.
Our long-term vision is to create a cultural infrastructure that can move with our people across borders, connecting communities through creativity, resource sharing, and collective care while allowing each community to remain rooted in its own local context.
Circuit Fest is an investment in the people who create culture, the spaces where culture happens, and the communities that make that culture possible.