WOW Festival returns to ‘innovate and challenge’ the arts world

Last Updated on May 1, 2025

The La Jolla Playhouse festival returns to UC San Diego April 24 through 27 with 25 immersive projects in various venues.

Striving for more impact with fewer walls, La Jolla Playhouse is bringing back its annual WOW Festival to the UC San Diego campus Thursday through Sunday, April 24-27.

Spread over several UCSD venues, the WOW (“Without Walls) Festival will showcase 25 projects in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, spectacle events and more, with multiple performances by acclaimed local, national and international artists occurring throughout the long weekend.

Most of the performances are free, with a few selected ticketed performances ranging from $12 to $37.

“I See You Like This”, Jessica Wilson.
Julia Dunin

The WOW Festival’s “four days of amazing, immersive and site-inspired work … tends to innovate and challenge the idea of what is the relationship between artists and audience,” La Jolla Playhouse Rich Family Artistic Director Christopher Ashley said during a festival preview event April 7.

And with this year’s artists coming from San Diego, New York, Texas, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and the United Kingdom, it’s “a great time to … be building bridges internationally,” Ashley said.

Included in the 2025 WOW Festival lineup is a one-on-one experience to discover how a child sees you; a sound and light show composed of 600 recycled car taillights; and four artists exploring extreme burnout while running on a treadmill.

There’s also “Green Memories,” an installation by artists and UCSD professors Shahrokh Yadegari and Memo Akten inspired by Forough Farrokhzad’s poem “I Pity the Garden.”

“By creating a fully immersive space, what we intend to do is to have the audience think about the fragile state of our social, political and ecological environment,” Yadegari said.

“Summer Break”, Stephane Bourgeois.

While speaking about Canadian company Flip Fabrique’s “Summer Break,” a circus show themed on a summer camp, representative Sarah Cooper recalled growing up in San Diego.

Sarah Cooper, representing “Summer Break,” speaks about the power of arts participation for children.

“I was in a nonprofit after school program, and my career journey today would not have been possible without support of the arts here,” she said.

Supporting art and artists is a crucial part of the WOW Festival’s impact, La Jolla Playhouse Managing Director Debby Buchholz said, adding the festival, which started in 2011, first appeared at UCSD in 2013.

“Now more than ever, we need to support UC San Diego,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said. “We need an opportunity to show that San Diego can compete at an international scale. And that’s what WOW has become. … It really sets a standard for others to follow.”

Beyond the arts, the WOW Festival and events like it are an economic boon to the city, said Jonathon Glus, director of the San Diego Department of Cultural Affairs.

Employing designers, videographers, stylists, and a breadth of other industry workers, WOW Festival brings “the creative sector together,” Glus said.

For the full WOW Festival schedule, information and tickets, visit wowfestival.org.

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