Jeffery Kin has a lot on his plate. The Executive Director of Sarasota Rising, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing a weeklong interdisciplinary arts festival to the city, Kin is used to wearing many hats—the actor and playwright moved to Sarasota from New York City to retire from the arts in 1991. Instead, he proceeded to become a mainstay on the area’s theater circuit before spending 15 years at the helm of The Players Centre for Performing Arts as the organization’s Producing Artistic Director. So while the past few years have been “the epitome of insanity” for Kin—he’s alright with that. After all, he’s an artist and in Sarasota, the arts always find each other.

Sarasota Rising started in 2021 with an idea— to create an event that would elevate the region’s arts institutions and cement Sarasota as Florida’s Cultural Coast™. “A group of people from the Downtown Improvement District, led by Dr. Mark Kauffman, basically said that we think Sarasota and our region deserves a festival of some kind. Places smaller than us have these, so why don’t we have anything organized?” says Kin. “That just started this idea of questioning why and when and why not? The answer became very simple. Sarasota is so incredible because of the entrepreneurship of individuals that fight for their organizations.” What Kin realized, however, from his time at The Players, is that while Sarasota is a hub for the arts, the majority of the arts organizations in the area operate within their own silos. There was nothing concrete pulling all of these organizations together. “These people have been in the trenches for years working on their organizations, but they’re used to working by themselves. They’re really not used to a great deal of collaboration or intercommunication,” says Kin.

So Kin and his team got to work. First they had to create a nonprofit, Sarasota Rising, that could serve as the production company for a potential arts festival. Then Kin had to figure out the really hard part—how in the world does one create a festival out of thin air? And perhaps even more challenging, how does one link together a seemingly disparate conglomerate of arts organizations for a one week event? “We wanted something sustainable that would help celebrate our arts and brand us as an arts destination once a year,” says Kin. Planning is one thing, but actually divesting the time, money and energy to make it happen was something else entirely. “Initially I grabbed about a dozen of my friends who are knowledgeable about the area and I put them in a room with Post It Notes and we started talking about what is a festival? Who are we and what do we call ourselves?” says Kin. “I learned from going to events to festival conferences and conventions, that festivals are a big deal. And they’re not a big deal just because they’re fun, it’s what they do for the economy. What they do for civic pride, to pull people together in a region and have people working together on projects, it’s very important.”

Over the past two years the festival has slowly started to take shape. Sarasota Rising gave it a name, the Living Arts Festival, and a date, November 10-17, 2024. Kin and his team knew that the festival had to have a structure, to highlight the area’s arts in a way that was fair to all parties involved. “Part of it was realizing that you can’t just have a festival and say ‘Everyone in the area be great this week’,” says Kin. “Because they do that every week, so if we’re going to build cultural tourism and try to make us stand out, for that week there’s got to be a party. There’s got to be an opening, a closing and special things that spice up a region. We decided to produce five main things during that week to make it a party.”

Those five events that Sarasota Rising is producing specifically for the festival look to serve the area’s arts community in a variety of ways. The Living Arts Festival is bookended by opening and closing parties—the opener, titled “A World of Arts” held on the rooftop of a downtown parking lot, highlights the diverse array of cultures represented in the Sarasota arts scene. The closing party, titled “Sarasota Rising: Celebrating Our Youth” will be held at the Circus Arts Conservatory and is a testament to the educational and youth programming of the area’s arts organizations. Around 300 youth performers from differing arts organizations, including the Sailor Circus Academy, the Sarasota Youth Opera, the Sarasota Ballet and more will come together to perform for a fun-filled evening. Additionally judges of the week’s festivities will anoint awards to some of the festival’s best performances. 

Nestled in the middle of the Living Arts Festival is “Our Embrace Reimagined,” a collaboration between the local arts non-profit Embracing Our Differences and Marie Selby Botanical Gardens that encapsulates the mission of the festival. Every year, Embracing Our Differences holds a juried arts exhibition that features billboard sized works of art accompanied by a captivating quotation—the organization receives thousands of submissions from across the world every year, hoping to be a part of the exhibit. Many of these panels, however, never find a home after each year’s exhibition. That’s where Kin and Sarasota Rising came in. 

“Right now we’re choosing nine panels from Embracing Our Differences last year that did not have a home. We have six different arts organizations including Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Modern Marimba and CreArte Latino. They are each choosing a panel from which they will create a five minute live performance piece inspired by that panel,” says Kin. “Then we’re going to rehang those panels at Historic Spanish Point for three days and sell performance walking tours where a group of people will go up to the panel and the organization will perform their live piece.” This collaboration between Embracing Our Differences and Selby Gardens does more than just allow these panels to live on—it fosters a relationship between two organizations that may have never worked together.

Instead of taking the more self-centered approach of “How can this work for the festival,” Kin reached out to organizations with the simple question of “How can we help you?” That approach to building out the festival illustrates what Sarasota Rising is all about—helping to promote and connect the organizations that make up the Cultural Coast. Because while the Living Arts Festival is the centerpiece of what Sarasota Rising has been trying to accomplish, it is not designed to be the end-all be-all for the organization. Rather, the Living Arts Festival is a jumping off point for the organization’s future endeavors in building a network of connection and support within the region’s arts community. For now, however, Kin and his team are taking things one step at a time as they continue to prep for November’s debut. “The idea is to make it as simple as possible. We don’t want to make organizations jump through hoops and produce something special for the festival. Whatever an arts organization’s mission is, we want to be there to support it,” says Kin. “We want more people to walk through their lobbies, more butts in their seats, more people in the restaurants, more heads in beds. What we’ve realized over the course of the past couple of years is that we’re more than a festival or a street fair or a kids art day— we’re a movement of helping all of us come together. To celebrate who we are and what makes us so unique and different.”