The Anchorage Folk Festival—a celebration of Alaska’s folk music and culture

For eleven days at the end of January, the Anchorage Folk Festival provides a dazzling array of concerts, music-related workshops by local and guest artists, and more, both in Anchorage and in nearby venues. Nearly all of the festival’s offerings are free events open to the public, the three exceptions being concerts/dances at venues in Downtown, Spenard, and Eagle River.

The festival takes several forms:

• two weekends of Alaskan folk music and culture celebrated and experienced in live performance (currently nearly 130 scheduled 15-minute sets) at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Wendy Williamson Auditorium, all of it free
• over 50 folk-music-related workshops at the Wendy Williamson Auditorium and in the adjacent Professional Studies Building, including workshops by our Guest Artists AJ Lee & Blue Summit and Corey Ledet Zydeco on their musical styles, instruments, and cultural heritage, plus by our Visual Artist Lee Post on cartooning, all of them free
• Folk Week: a variety of 40-some live-music gigs at nine venues in and around Anchorage by local musicians—an opportunity to experience and celebrate our abundant musical talent in some of our city’s cafés, pubs, restaurants, and marketplaces, starting Sunday January 26 (see the Folk Week page for details and addresses) and culminating in a Community Jam at Guido’s Pizza on Friday night, all of it free
• three big off-site concerts of our featured Guest Artists and local musicians
• plus two raffle drawings, a silent auction, and our Annual Members’ Meeting, Instrument Swap, and Alaska’s only Banjo Contest.

Come check out as much of it as you like, as our guest!