Arts Disaster and Crisis Preparedness Conference 2026

A strength the arts bring to disaster preparedness and recovery is their ability to incorporate narrative and storytelling. Much of emergency preparedness education, disaster reporting, and support for survivors is fact-based, dry and didactic, hiding the human experiences and costs of these disasters. But how do we build collective narratives that tell a more complete story? What participatory story-building tools do we have as artists? How do we build shared stories in diverse communities with very different lived experiences?


Join a group of artists sharing practices for generating collective stories. Together we will explore our tools for creating narrative together, to inform our preparedness and recovery work in our communities. This is an experiential and experimental lab, where we will explore movement and storytelling methodologies from a variety of pedagogies to develop practices for working with groups new to storytelling. We will try out material creation methods that can
be used to shape performances, and methods of connecting and processing that can be used in any group setting from conferences to classrooms. Join us to experiment with new tools, discuss a variety of modalities for generating creative material, and discover new strategies for building shared stories. Bring your own tools and exercises to add to the mix, and work with our group of artists, first responders, facilitators and emergency preparedness specialists to test out some of ours. Our group has experience facilitating story and performance workshops with artists, first responders and emergency management professionals - and we know that each process is one of experimentation and learning.


Come experiment together with strategies that might fit your audiences and creative teams, and leave with new tools to use in your own community to prepare for, process, and heal from emergencies and disasters.