Living a Creative Life Congress
Calgary Arts Development
When: Thursday, November 20, 2025
Location: DJD Dance Centre
Cost: Free but registration is required
About this year’s Congress
For the past two years, the Living a Creative Life Congress has focused on art for social change. At those gatherings, we featured inspirational guest speakers and amazing local artists who are using their community-engaged art practice to provoke positive change in the world. This year we invited a handful of artist collectives to experiment with ways to inspire civic participation through the arts. In the spring of 2025, we posted a call for artist collectives to participate in the Creating our Calgary project, a rigorous six-month process to encourage civic participation.
Using a process created by the internationally acclaimed Center for Artistic Activism, and led locally by Recess Calgary, five local artist collectives created innovative projects to encourage Calgarians to imagine the kind of city they want to live in and become more civically engaged. Find out what happened with those projects at this year’s Congress, featuring a review of the Creating our Calgary project, re-enactments of some of the artist collectives’ activations and some tips for your own community-driven art practice. Get inspired, exchange ideas, meet other artists, community-builders and possibly find future collaborators. Free lunch will be available for the in-person event. Find out more about the artist collectives and their Creating our Calgary activations here.
The 2025 Living a Creative Life Congress is on Thursday, November 20 in-person from 10am to 4:30pm at the DJD Dance Centre. The morning session (10am – 12:45pm) will be streamed online for those who cannot attend in person. ASL interpretation is provided.
Learn more about this year’s Living a Creative Life Congress here.
Registration
Register here to attend in person
Register here to attend online
Information about the artist collectives and the Creating Our Calgary project can be found here.
Left: Artist collective Crate-ive Crew’s Project Your Voice activation invited youth to turn their hopes for Calgary into glowing messages.
Right: Ayo Collective’s Silent Protest is a striking arrangement of chairs, empty yet resonant, each marked with the silences, hesitations and barriers that keep many from the ballot box.
