We are Nashville's home for radically unique, independent artists.
Founded in 2018, Kindling Arts develops innovative new works by Nashville’s experimental artists, empowering diverse creators with the resources required to explore challenging ideas in a multidisciplinary context. By providing local artists with space, resources, and practical support, Kindling promotes underrepresented voices and aesthetics, making space for boundary-pushing work that would otherwise be impossible. Kindling’s core programming includes the annual Kindling Arts Festival, a multi-day celebration of local artists that showcases more than a dozen diverse performances and events in various venues throughout Nashville, as well as unique arts events year-round.
UPCOMING
WITHIN REACH
Encore presentation at Shades of Black Theater Festival
Sunday, September 7th at 3PM
Darkhorse Theater (4610 Charlotte Ave)
Within Reach is a powerful world premiere that centers the voices of Nashvillians with lived experience of incarceration. Conceived and directed by theater-maker and activist Shawn Whitsell and created in collaboration with an ensemble of artists impacted by the carceral system including visual artist and photographer Jima Akhenjah-Weaver, this urgent new work offers an unflinching look at the systemic injustices of the prison industrial complex and a deeply moving celebration of the resilience of the human spirit.
Kindling Arts Festival 2025:
FORTUNES & FATES
Thank you for making this our biggest year yet!
Kindling Arts Festival 2025 took over West Nashville from July 24-27 with a spellbinding array of 19 original performance projects created by the most daring local artists. We welcomed more than 2,500 enthusiastic audience members to our Fortunes & Fates festival line-up which offered a vast array of different lively and timely performance offerings, including: a feminist electro-pop reimagining of the Salem witch trials, urgent theatrical works wrestling with our present times, a fantastical drug-induced queer journey into a fictional land, interactive events exploring communal power and alternative economies, and so much more.
