USAAF 2026: Common Ground

This year’s theme, Common Ground, invites us to reflect on our relationships with each other and with the spaces we move through together as AAPIs in the diaspora by exploring what it means to take up space and practice placemaking for others. The festival will celebrate modes of thinking about solidarity through shared experiences and histories by underscoring how visibility in public spaces can cultivate belonging. 

• How do API communities continue to create spaces for gathering and community care through arts and culture? How do we use these spaces to act in solidarity with other BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ communities and work towards collective liberation?

• What does it mean to create and hold space for healing, and how does API cultural expression inform the ways that we are able to expand reflective spaces within ourselves? 

• How do we continue to create spaces to amplify API narratives in the face of injustice and erasure in the United States? How can the arts help us imagine new ways to tell our stories and steward our histories for future generations?   

Thank you to our many partners and funders including the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, California Arts Council, Zellerbach Family Foundation and startsmall.