Anniversaries are a time to reflect on where we’ve come from and set our sights on the future. After celebrating five years, it’s clear that Vancouver has embraced Indian Summer wholeheartedly. Since our inception, we’ve grown by 400% overall—an exponential yet steady increase across all key measures each year.

The festival’s byline, Where Worlds Meet, reflects our commitment to artistic collaboration. We aim to create what we call good friction—going beyond the easy middle ground to encourage true curatorial risk-taking.

Building new relationships and being an active part of the community is core to our mission. This includes offering free public programming, welcoming new audiences, and increasing accessibility across our events.

In 2015, all festival venues were wheelchair and scooter accessible, with this information clearly shared in our event program and online. We offered complimentary tickets to community groups facing financial and social barriers, and provided a dedicated prayer room for those observing Ramadan to break their fast in comfort.

We also brought art into unexpected places. Indian Summer Festival 2015 featured five free public art projects across Metro Vancouver—from a city bus wrapped in vibrant Indian graphics, to a travelling photo booth by a Hollywood set designer, to young artists reimagining Chinatown’s layered histories and South Asian resistance movements.