Indian Summer Arts Society Announces Am Johal as Curator-in-Residence

Indian Summer Arts Society Announces Am Johal as Curator-in-Residence

Indian Summer Arts Society Announces Am Johal Curator

Indian Summer Arts Society Announces Am Johal as Curator-in-Residence for 15th Annual Indian Summer Festival

Festival runs from July 3-13, with programming announcement to be shared soon

(Vancouver, BC) – The Indian Summer Arts Society today announces that Am Johal is Curator-in-Residence for the 15th annual Indian Summer Festival, running from July 3-13, 2025, at various venues across Vancouver.

Am Johal brings a fresh perspective to the festival’s programming, drawing from his deep and expansive experience in the arts. Previously, he served as Director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement and co-director of SFU’s Community Engaged Research Initiative. He is a podcast host, accomplished author, guest speaker and Board member for various organizations in Vancouver, including a past role as Chair of the Indian Summer Festival 2020-2023.

“It’s an honour to be invited to be the Indian Summer Festival Curator-in-Residence. The festival provides a wonderful platform to showcase innovative ideas and create meaningful experiences and dialogue for the community,” says Am Johal. “I’m excited to collaborate, work with diverse voices, and engage with artists and writers and thinkers. We will announce our 15th anniversary programming very soon, with thoughtful events that everyone has come to expect from the Indian Summer Festival.”

“We are so grateful to have Am Johal as Curator-in-Residence for Indian Summer Festival 2025,” says Laura June Albert, Executive Managing Director. “Am brings a visionary perspective, evidenced by this incredible theme of Borderless Solidarities that he is programming for the 2025 Festival this July.”

The 2025 theme, Borderless Solidarities, reflects a world marked by closed borders, authoritarianism, and violence and the urgency for alternative thinking and living grows. The theme proposes that the world of arts and culture bears the distinctive power to unfold a possible countersignature to the present.

About the Indian Summer Festival:

Indian Summer Festival (ISF) offers startling, nourishing, and inspirational multi-arts experiences through a South Asian lens. The two-week festival is held each July in Vancouver. Connecting rich and complex pasts with the emerging future, the Indian Summer Festival centres and interrogates cultural diversity in innovative ways, sparking national and international impact. Each year, the festival presents provocative arts events that feature some of the finest artists and visionaries from Canada, South Asia and beyond. From novelists to musicians, installation artists to movie stars, the Indian Summer Festival has presented emerging artists and Nobel, Booker, Grammy and Oscar prize nominees on its stages. ISF 2025, the 15th Festival edition, will be July 3-13, 2025.

For festival news, highlights and access to events, please visit indiansummerfest.ca