Santa Fe Magazine Festival 2026

For years, Santa Fe Magazine has interviewed the artists, mystics, scientists, outliers, and visionaries who make Santa Fe the Creative Capital of the US. Now, the Santa Fe Festival creates a setting for powerful dialogues that expand imagination and curiosity.

It is an opportunity to experience the community and conversations that connect us, the art and ideas that provoke us, and the music and food that fill us.

*Speakers and times subject to change. Sessions are first-come, first-served. A one-year subscription, per household, to Santa Fe Magazine (valued at $39.00) is included with the purchase of your ticket. If you are already a subscriber, an additional year of the magazine will be added to your current term.

Info: Where the Southwest meets New Orleans. The Crawfish Boyz are a beloved local Santa Fe band known for playing an infectious mix of New Orleans jazz, Zydeco and dance music.

Info: A sensory lounge hosted by Calyx Armatura & nomen nescio [n.n] (KB Thomason). Through layered atmospheres of fragrance and sonic texture, participants are invited to experience how the nose and ear can evoke vivid inner landscapes, transposing the visual into felt perception. Drop in, slow down and explore memory, imagination and presence through a multidimensional field of deep sensing.

Info: New York. Los Angeles. Austin. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. According to an independent analysis released in February 2026, the creative capital of America isn’t where you think it is. Measured not by hype or hotel bookings, but by per-capita concentration of working creatives, institutional depth and centuries of continuous artistic practice — Santa Fe leaves every other American city behind. Data scientist Peter Zandan, Ph.D. and founder of IQ2 Analytics and Insights, explores his findings with Santa Fe’s Mayor and New Mexico Innovation Hub founder, David Perez, and former Community Development Director for the City, Elisa Montoya.

Info: One of America’s most sought-after personal matchmakers, Julie Ferman, tackles Santa Fe’s crisis of loneliness head-on. After three decades and 1,400+ success stories, Julie brings her expertise to the Festival with an interactive exercise in which she will share how we can turn strangers into keepers — in friendship, business, community and romance.

Info: Nikki McCauley, an intuitive painter, finds images in paint splatters — watch notes from the infinite emerge live.

Info: What does it mean to build a creative life — and a film — on your own terms in New Mexico? Director Kristin Goodman joins actors Cassidy Freeman (Righteous Gemstones, Longmire, Smallville) and Alexandra Renzo for a conversation about carving out space for women in the film industry, the realities of making work outside traditional power centers and the unique creative landscape of New Mexico.

Using Goodman’s latest project as a jumping-off point, the trio will explore how storytelling is evolving in an age where attention is currency and personal lives are increasingly public — and how women filmmakers are pushing back, reclaiming narrative and shaping what comes next.

Info: Writers like D. H. Lawrence and Willa Cather came to the Southwest searching for something they couldn’t find anywhere else — and found themselves transformed by it. In this landscape, each produced some of their most enduring work, drawn by a force that was at once creative, spiritual and deeply rooted in place.
Author Henry Shukman and historian Garrett Peck, in a conversation moderated by Owen Lipstein — who shares his own scholarly connection to Lawrence — explore how New Mexico sparked a sensibility that still shapes the region’s enduring creative force.

Info: Andrew Weil has spent six decades being loyal to his curiosity. That curiosity didn’t just make him a better doctor. It made him the doctor who invented a field. Integrative medicine, now practiced at over 70 academic health centers worldwide, exists because Weil had the creative nerve to question what medicine left out: the whole person. At the festival, he’ll trace the role creativity has played in that invention and what it means for how we heal.

Info: Man Boy Brown is the solo project of Raul Pacheco — vocalist, guitarist and co-founder of the three-time Grammy-winning band Ozomatli — exploring a more intimate and reflective side of his artistry. Blending romantic Latin ballads, Mexican corridos, and spacious, emotionally driven arrangements, the music balances nostalgia with forward momentum, rooted in tradition while carving out a distinct creative voice.

Info: The Santa Fe Magazine Festival and Vladem Contemporary are proud to announce the new immersive experience by Virgil Ortiz and Eric Garcia, Blindfall/First Strike, from the Revolt 1680/2180 series. Best to let Virgil describe it: We are activating the Vladem Contemporary Museum as a site of temporal collision. Clay becomes monument. Paintings become mirrors. Fashion becomes armor. Light fractures the space as 1680 and 2180 fold into an immersive reckoning of ancestral memory, resistance, and renewal. The immersive experience runs all three days at the Vladem and is open to all festivalgoers.

Info: Begin the day with a reflective morning blessing led by JP Granillo, rooted in Santa Fe’s spirit of place, community and renewal. This intimate gathering offers a moment to step into the day with intention.

Info: Acclaimed historians and authors Dan Flores and Hampton Sides engage in a spirited conversation about the lore and allure of New Mexico — and their love affair with the natural worlds of the American West.

Info: Roshi Joan Halifax and author, climate and human rights activist, Rebecca Solnit engage in a rich exploration of how we remain undefended, responsive, morally awake and compassionate in times of uncertainty, collapse and transformation. They want to explore how communities endure, how attention itself is ethical action, and why beauty, ritual, storytelling and silence matter during times of upheaval.

Info: Raul Pacheco has spent 30 years writing songs that make people move, think and feel things they didn’t expect. As co-founder of Ozomatli — the Grammy-winning Latin fusion band with a cult following and a reputation for electrifying live shows — he’s earned his place among the great American songwriters. Normally, you’d pay to watch him perform on stage. Today, we’re doing something way better than a concert. As a group, you’re going to write a song! No experience necessary. Just one of the great American musicians, an intimate room and the insights he’s been carrying since before most of us knew what Latin fusion was.

Info: This August, the Santa Fe Opera presents the American premiere of Grammy Award-winning composer Tobias Picker’s Lili Elbe — the astonishing true story of a Danish painter who, supported by the fierce devotion of her wife Gerda, became one of the first people in history to undergo gender-affirmation surgery. Chronicling a story popularized by the 2015 film The Danish Girl, the opera was named “Best World Premiere” at the 2024 OPER! Awards in Germany. Now it arrives in Santa Fe — and KHFM Executive Director Alexis Corbin will lead a conversation with director James Robinson about bringing Lili Elbe to the stage.

Info: Gallery owner Pilar Law, photographer Tony Floyd and agent Maria Markus on the craft, patience and human connection behind capturing unforgettable images — along with stories from the life and legacy of the late Kurt Markus. Together, they’ll explore what it means to be present behind the lens, where instinct meets preparation and trust becomes essential. Through personal stories and hard-won insight, they’ll reveal how great photographs are shaped as much by relationship and timing as by technique.

Info: The Education Director of the Santa Fe Raptor Center will introduce us to several magnificent birds — each with a story of injury or survival — and take us behind the remarkable work of healing, rehabilitation, and second chances that defines the Center’s mission. Meet the birds. Hear their stories. See wildness up close.

Info: She walked into a tech company as a transformational speaker and immediately knew two things: she had no idea how the software worked, and the women around her were being quietly, systematically underestimated. Most people would have stayed in their lane. Tania picked up a marker. By turning the iconic restroom symbol’s dress into a superhero cape, she sparked #ItWasNeverADress — a social impact campaign that spread around the world and permanently changed how we see women in the workplace. That instinct — finding the precise, unexpected gesture that shifts everything — is exactly what she brings to startups, arts & culture orgs and Fortune 500s, turning the status quo into social change. She’s authored the award-winning book about how everyone can see unlimited possibilities: Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Joy & Spark Back Into Your Life & Work. In this interactive session, be forewarned: you might experience laughter, collaboration and joy.

Info: In the May issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article appeared entitled, “St. John’s College Is Weird. Maybe Yours Should Be More Like It.” St. John’s Santa Fe was voted “the most rigorous education in America” by Forbes Magazine, and in the New York Times, Frank Bruni called St. John’s “the most contrarian college in America.” What makes St. John’s so weird, rigorous and contrarian? This panel will provide participants with an opportunity to hear from and discuss with members of the St. John’s teaching faculty the nature of the St. John’s “Great Books” curriculum and its unique approach to higher education, while reflecting on the questions: “What is liberal education, and what role can it play in the American Republic today?”

Info: Across continents and millennia, ancient civilizations looked to the sky — and left behind maps of meaning etched in earth and stone. With three acclaimed PBS films that provide deep insights into Chaco Canyon, archaeoastronomer Anna Sofaer once again draws on her more than four decades of research to bring Chaco into conversation with some of the world’s most extraordinary ancient sites. With her new film-in-progress, From the Mind’s Eye, she explores striking parallels among Stonehenge, Palenque and the ancient Hopewell culture in Ohio to reveal fresh insights into Chaco’s singular brilliance and enduring significance in the American Southwest and in the heritage of descendant Puebloan cultures.

Info: Raul Pacheco has spent 30 years writing songs that make people move, think and feel things they didn’t expect. As co-founder of Ozomatli — the Grammy-winning Latin fusion band with a cult following and a reputation for electrifying live shows — he’s earned his place among the great American songwriters. Normally, you’d pay to watch him perform on stage. Today, we’re doing something way better than a concert. As a group, you’re going to write a song! No experience necessary. Just one of the great American musicians, an intimate room and the insights he’s been carrying since before most of us knew what Latin fusion was.

Info: Join artist and perfumer Ria Leigh Res Extensa of Calyx Armatura for an intimate exploration of the senses. Using scent as a catalyst for creative inquiry, each participant will receive a personalized aromatic composition drawn from the perfumer’s organ. From this olfactory point of departure, participants are invited to delve into the memories, imagery and ideas that arise and translate their sensory experience via the medium of their choice. Materials will be available on site for immediate exploration, or the scent may be taken home as a seed for continued creative unfolding.

Info: Taos-based Afro-Indigenous country-blues artist whose “Rebel Folk” sound blends Southwestern grit with Southern roots. With raw, outlaw-style ballads and soulful guitar work, his music channels the spirit and stories of life in New Mexico.

Info: Before the installations. Before the investors. Before Las Vegas and Denver and the lines around the block — there was a group of broke, brilliant misfits in Santa Fe who pulled two words out of a hat and decided to build a door into another world. Now, for the first time at the Santa Fe Magazine Festival, three of the original co-founders sit down together to tell the story the press releases never told. The grief inside the growth. The moment they almost lost everything. What it feels like to become the institution you once painted over. And whether the original fire — that beautiful, ungovernable, dumpster-diving, wall-stapling, sleeping-in-the-building fire — is still burning.

Info: On a clear August day in 2022 — with no clouds and no warning — the ground erupted into a three-hundred-million-volt fireball, splitting trees, hurling stones and igniting rock in a moment that defied expectation. Scott Christopher and Elizabeth Hayes Christopher had experienced a rare phenomenon known as “blue sky lightning.” The Christophers, internationally recognized multidisciplinary artists, were outside their Santa Fe studios when it struck — an event that profoundly reshaped how they see the world and approach their art. Scott and Elizabeth invite you into an immersive experience blending live presentation, performance, and conversation around this extraordinary event. Through large-scale murals, paintings and photography, they explore the energy, beauty and mystery born from the lightning strike. The experience also features Elizabeth’s poetry from Lightning Seeds and a segment of their internationally performed performance art.

Info: With soaring melodies, raw poetic storytelling and evocative live performances, this Americana singer-songwriter brings the spirit of the open road to life as a charismatic, well-traveled troubadour.

Info: Moderated by neuroscientist Ellen Petry Leanse, this conversation brings together award-winning screenwriter Bill Broyles, UNM researcher Larry Leeman, MD, MPH, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist, Marisa L. C de Baca, LCSW and filmmaker Gay Dillingham to explore both personal experience and the real-world impact of psychedelics in Santa Fe – and beyond. From measurable changes in the brain to experiences people describe as sacred, the panel examines what happens when long-held patterns begin to loosen: trauma reframed, addiction softened, creativity unlocked, and identity itself questioned.

Info: JP Granillo spent his entire twenties in federal maximum security Pr*son — including eighteen months in solitary — after orchestrating one of the largest bank robberies in New Mexico history. He came home to Santa Fe a muralist, a community builder, a man whose work now hangs in the Museum of International Folk Art. Garry Blackchild, Afro-Indigenous and son of a Honduran immigrant, came to New Mexico chasing folk music, landed in a Georgia J*il, and wrote every song on his album Rebel Folk behind bars. Two men, radically different backgrounds, the same crucible. In conversation with each other — and with us — they explore what Pr*son takes, what it unexpectedly gives, and what it means to come back changed.

Info: The standard climate conversation runs on dread. This one doesn’t. Jesse Roach — director of Santa Fe’s water department, hydrologist, PhD and former Colorado River guide — has spent years with the data and still calls himself a “Cornucopian.” Juliana Ciano has diverted over 1.5 million pounds of food waste annually at Reunity Farm, building a regenerative system from the ground up. Sara Dant, historian and author of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West, brings deep context — from the region’s past to precedent-setting legal work on stream navigability. Together, they move beyond crisis talk to ask a sharper question: what’s actually working — and what isn’t — when it comes to water, soil and the systems that shape our future. Guided by Marc Barasch, who asks the questions others tend to avoid, this is a conversation grounded in reality, but alive with possibility.

Info: This conversation brings together visionary placemakers and changemakers Catherine Oppenheimer (National Dance Institute and New Mexico School for the Arts), Maggie Fine (Canyon Road Summer Walk), David Fresquez (Santa Fe Gloom) and City of Santa Fe’s Director of Economic Development, Johanna Nelson. From iconic stages to streets, schools and digital platforms, their work spans the physical and the virtual — rooted in local storytelling, community energy and access. Through community concerts, educational initiatives, inclusive programming and grassroots media, these innovators explore how intentional placemaking can build stronger, more connected communities — right here, and in ways that ripple far beyond.

Info: Here’s what nobody’s telling you about AI: the interesting part isn’t what it can do. It’s what it can see — about us. The Mythoscope, a new psychological tool built by a novelist, a data scientist and AI, maps the hidden tensions in our psyche using something harder to fake than data: our taste. What happens when artists and machines build something together that neither could create alone? This conversation with Creative Director Jace Mercer, Meow Wolf Co-Founder Vince Kadlubek and led by Data Scientist Peter Zandan, explores that collision — where storytelling, technology and human contradiction meet — and what it uncovers about who we are in a culture eager to reduce us to categories.

Info: Jen Sincero was forty and broke in a converted garage. She wrote You Are a Badass, which has sold over five million copies. Tania Katan survived breast cancer twice, grabbed a theater degree everyone said was worthless, and turned rebellion into the award-winning Creative Trespassing. Julie Ferman walked into a dating service in St. Louis, asked out the guy who sold her the membership, married him and built a matchmaking empire responsible for more than 1,400 love stories. None followed the plan. All of them turned the thing that went sideways into the thing that worked. And every one of them did it laughing. This is a conversation about humor as a survival strategy — about the moment you realize the worst thing that happened to you is also the funniest, and that the distance between those two truths is where the best books, businesses and second acts get built.

Info: Santa Fe has been the hub of the contemporary Indigenous art market for close to sixty years, and Native art has finally been given a seat at the table in the larger art world. Get an insider’s look at this always-lively market from those who have been making it happen. Will Riding In, curator at the Wheelwright Museum, and Danyelle Means, Executive Director at MIAC, join Comanche artist Nocona Burgess and art appraiser and advisor Scott Hale moderating.

Info: After a devastating childhood injury that nearly ended his life — and his ability to play — Scott Christopher went on to become a professional baseball champion and record holder, defying nearly impossible odds. Blending personal story with powerful insight, this talk explores the mindset, resilience and imagination required to pursue one’s dreams. Featuring reflections from legends like three time teammate, the greatest shortstop in Major League Baseball history, Cal Ripken Jr. and four team World Series Champion coach, Jimmy “Skip” Williams, the session reveals how passion and purpose can transform setbacks into possibility — and how a life in sport can evolve into a life in art.

Info: Marc Maron Comes Home — an in-depth conversation about his reflections on the beatniks, open roads and mesas of Albuquerque that shaped his voice. They’ll also discuss vulnerability and grief, and how parasocial relationships, cultural shallowness, fragmented media and charismatic moral grifters are eroding the art of storytelling.

Info: A powerful multimedia journey through memory, war, faith and identity, this project weaves the World War II journal of Roberto Lucero with original songs by his grandson, Robert L. Lucero, Jr. Blending live music, film and photography, the performance moves seamlessly across Latin genres — from son and bolero to ranchera, cumbia and trova — bringing history vividly to life.

Info: Angela Ellsworth, co-founder of the Museum of Walking, has built an entire artist-led institution around this deceptively simple idea — that walking, done right, is one of the most profound things a human being can do. As she says, “Walking is very different than running. It’s not about a goal. It’s not about a race. It’s just about being in the world. And it’s analog, no technology needed.” This is not really meditation. Nor pilgrimage. Nor exercise. It’s something harder to name and more valuable than any of those things. Join Angela Ellsworth and KB Soundscapes for a walk in the arroyos behind St. John’s campus — under the sky, among the birds and critters, and the particular quiet of this place — and discover what you’ve been walking past your entire life, or maybe in your imagination.

Info: Some spaces hold silence differently than others. The chapel of Santa Fe’s historic Carmelite Monastery is one of them — a place where stillness has been practiced, accumulated, and deepened for generations. Join us when MEA presents an intimate soundbath in the historic chapel — a rare chance to let the oldest form of healing unfold in one of Santa Fe’s most sacred spaces. Come with nothing to do and nowhere to be. Leave changed in ways you may not be able to explain.

Info: Two renowned icons of longevity research sit down together. Andrew Weil, who invented integrative medicine and has written extensively on healthy aging, has spent decades arguing that the goal isn’t to stop aging but to do it well — that the rewards of growing older include depth, wisdom and what he calls “its own kind of power and grace.” Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy and subject of a recent New York Times profile on reinventing how we live in later life, believes midlife is not a crisis but a chrysalis. Both now call Santa Fe home.

Info: Almost sixty years since it exploded onto American screens, Bonnie and Clyde still retains the power to shock, amaze and provoke — as fresh and (sadly) relevant today as when it was first released in 1967. In his latest book, writer Kirk Ellis situates the movie in the larger context of America’s predilection for armed violence and its enshrining of lawbreakers. He joins Miranda Viscoli, Executive Director of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, in what promises to be a provocative dialogue touching on the history of the Second Amendment and the ways in which popular culture — rather than history — has shaped the American myth.

Info: After rediscovering the Sun Dagger on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon in 1977, archaeoastronomer Anna Sofaer and the Solstice Project launched four decades of groundbreaking research. Their film The Sun Dagger — narrated by Robert Redford and broadcast on PBS — illuminates the ancestral Puebloan creation of a sacred shrine uniting sun, moon and landscape. Sofaer and Richard Friedman will discuss the team’s latest innovation: the interactive Sun Dagger Explorer. This digital model preserves the site while bringing its extraordinary engineering and astronomical insight into vivid focus. A half-hour version of the film will be screened.

Info: IAIA President Dr. Shelly C. Lowe and Jessica Matten, lead actress on Dark Winds, discuss Matten’s initiative designed to train and employ the next generation of Indigenous creators, followed by an inside conversation with the cast of Dark Winds.

Info: Godfrey Reggio is a visionary, a saint, a sinner and a cinematic kamikaze. The auteur behind Koyaanisqatsi and Once Upon a Time in the West, joins the Santa Fe International Film Festival founder to reckon with cinema’s troubled present, revisit his predictions that proved eerily accurate and look to the future. What he has to say may unsettle you.

Info: Creativity: what, actually, is it? Something some people are born with and others wish for? A practice, one that can be learned? Or maybe a mindset that anyone can activate when they understand what’s really going on in creative thought? Neurologist Ellen Petry Leanse — who has explained this to the leaders of Apple, Google, and Facebook — will, in this session, dive deep into the process of three acclaimed Santa Fe creatives and offer glimpses into the neuroscience behind the creative fluency we all seek. Best of all, it will leave you with insights into your own mental processes that will spark more creativity in everything you do.

Info: Jono Manson blends roots rock, soul, folk, country and pop into a powerful, genre-bending style marked by emotional honesty and dynamic live performances. His five-decade career spans New York’s underground scene, international collaborations and award-winning production work from his Santa Fe base.

Info: The co-founders of MEA, the world’s first midlife wisdom school, have spent years rethinking everything we assume about the second half of life. Their answer isn’t a graceful retreat — it’s a radical reframe. That means building regenerative friendships that actively fuel your growth and choosing regenerative living over the quiet fade of traditional retirement. This means building an intentional community designed, as they put it, to feel “nothing like a commune or kibbutz.” This session isn’t about aging gracefully. It’s about aging ambitiously.

Info: From the desert transcendentalists to artists working today, New Mexico has long inspired art shaped by land, light, myth and contradiction. Executive Director of the New Mexico Museum of Art, Marisa Sage, joins Editor-in-Chief of Southwest Contemporary, Jordan Eddy, and artist Diego Medina to explore the creative ecosystems that have emerged here and what the future of art in the desert might ask of us now.

Info: Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid ended one world and began another. Since then, North America has been slowly, painstakingly filling with life — until one species arrived and began undoing it. Historian and naturalist Dan Flores has spent his career tracing that arc: the long, magnificent story of animals on this continent and the accelerating human forces that are unraveling it. But this isn’t a eulogy. Flores believes we can still change the ending — through rewilding, ecosystem restoration and a radical recommitment to biodiversity, including on the pieces of ground where we live. Sara Dant, Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Politics, will make the scientific and moral case for a different kind of future. One that still has wolves in it. And bison. And room for everything we almost lost.

Info: One of only eight grandmasters of scalp acupuncture in the world practices in Santa Fe. For 32 years, Jason Hao has been doing what many in Western medicine would call impossible: treating neurological conditions through the precision art of scalp acupuncture, and producing recoveries that have to be witnessed to be believed. And he’s here, in Santa Fe, seeing patients and changing lives. In this session, he’ll walk us through the cases, the science and the moments that even he still finds miraculous. Following the presentation, Dr. Hao will offer neural acupuncture to a limited number of participants.

Info: As new details continue to surface about Jeffrey Epstein’s vast network of sexual exploitation, trafficking, and political entanglement, the scale of silence and complicity hits closer to home — at Zorro Ranch, within systems that failed to see or chose not to act. Now, that silence is being challenged. Representative Andrea Romero, who spearheaded the state’s new bipartisan truth commission, joins investigative reporters Sally Denton and Clara Bates to follow the threads others have left hanging. What happened. Who knew. Why has accountability been so elusive? And, what does it mean for New Mexico to confront not just one case, but a pattern of sexual violence ignored, of missing and murdered Indigenous people overlooked, of power operating without consequence? The questions aren’t just what’s hidden. It’s who is finally willing to look.

Info: Congressional leaders, military whistleblowers and executive branch officials — from the CIA Chief to the Secretary of State to the President — have publicly suggested actual Disclosure could be imminent. New Mexico’s garland of high security facilities have been sites of UFO incursions, with Roswell the grandaddy of them all. Marc Barasch, bestselling author and writer/producer of the breakthrough documentary The Phenomenon, talks to Donald Schmitt, former lead investigator for the late J. Alan Hynek (of Close Encounters and Project Blue Book fame). Schmitt, a founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center at Roswell, spent over 30 years interviewing hundreds of local military personnel and civilians stitching together a compelling picture of the apparent crash and retrieval of a nonhuman craft and bodies over the course of seven books. This will be a colloquy about cover-ups of paradigm-shifting secrets and the implications for the whole of society if they were revealed.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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