Laurie Kirby Built the Room Where Festival Creators Go to Think
FestForums wasn’t built for applause. It was built for the people who build culture.
Editor’s Note:The festival side of the live world is often underestimated. At GatheringPoint.News, we’re mapping how it all connects—festivals, conferences, fandom, culture—as the industry morphs into something new. This story is a keystone in that evolving map.
The woman at the center of this story never auditioned for the role. Laurie Kirby grew up on the New Jersey coast, summers spent in a salty blur of swimming and boogie boards, and later in Montclair’s high-school theater, where she first learned to hold a room. “My life has been like a summer camp,” she told me, “sometimes a very tough summer camp.” She had a scholarship to Northwestern’s theater school but, after her parents’ divorce, changed course: “I did pre-law and went on to law school” at Rutgers, where she captained the lacrosse team—then spent two decades as a lawyer before crossing the country and crossing the aisle into a different kind of stage: the festival world.
That résumé isn’t folklore. Kirby helped launch the Legends Tour (now The Legends of the LPGA), served as general counsel to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, and—after a board stint turned executive post at the Newport International Film Festival—fell hard for the rhythm of programming, curation, and civic choreography. “I always loved the arts,” she said. “What I realized after running several festivals was how dysfunctional, disorganized, and isolated they were.” So in 2015, she did the obvious thing no one had done at scale: she built a convening for the conveners. FestForums wouldn’t be a trade show pretending to be a community; it would be a community with standards—panels that go deeper than boilerplate, a small but serious marketplace, and a curatorial spine that treats festivals as engines of culture and commerce.
Santa Barbara became the house style. The flagship unfolds at the Mar Monte Hotel across from East Beach—ocean light, Spanish-Revival bones, a cadence that makes the hallways as valuable as the rooms. Kirby laughs at any suggestion that it’s a boondoggle. “Let’s make this salon-like,” she told me of her original brief. “Put it at the ocean… I humanized it. I brought in women, people of color, voices you weren’t hearing.” When she tried screening films on site, she dropped it—“people really don’t want to go sit and watch films… they’d rather go listen to live music.” That’s the FestForums mood: summer-camp energy with a grad-seminar spine, a place to exhale and then get exacting about the work.
And the crowd? It isn’t a sea of badges for optics. It’s the right five or six hundred: programmers, buyers, bookers, curators, city negotiators, technical directors—the upstream hands that actually move a lineup or a budget line. “We always get in the mid-nineties on satisfaction,” Kirby told me. “I do it for the young people… they inspire me more than I inspire them.” Coverage of the most recent edition captured the pacing and texture—570 attendees, 64 speakers, 24 exhibitors—and the sense that it’s less conference than brain trust (Grateful Web). You could feel the town in it, too: Santa Barbara Independent framed it as a beach-adjacent salon; KEYT caught the opening-night uplift from world-champ surfer Shaun Tomson.
If you want the headline names, sure: she put actor Matthew Modine onstage and let Tomson open with purpose. But watch the flow of influence. A year out from Glastonbury, an Isle of Wight veteran swaps rain-plan notes with Summerfest’s chief; a Sundance or Tribeca programmer trades discovery stories with a Cannes buyer; the people behind ESSENCE Festival and NYC/South Beach Wine & Food compare sponsor math with Hawai‘i Food & Wine’s Denise Yamaguchi; Kevin Lyman of Warped Tour talks next-gen safety with a municipal ops chief; Digital Domain co-founder Scott Ross frames how AI will hit production. That’s the business of FestForums: not spectacle, consequence. It’s a room full of wholesalers of culture—the programmers, buyers, bookers, and curators who decide what the rest of us will call the scene six months later. FestForums is where they compare notes before the world gets the goods.
Kirby is explicit about the why. In public she’s praised the niche festivals that thrive by knowing their tribes and warned that you can’t “commoditize” the form; as she told Pollstar, smaller festivals with a point of view are often the smarter bet. In our conversation she made the stakes personal. “In the film festival market alone, 70% of all film festivals fail in the first year… you’d better have a sturdy stomach,” she said. “It’s expensive. There’s a lot of liability. You probably won’t make any money for at least the first three years.” As for the myth that the festival market is a perpetual boom: “That’s always the question—who’s in the audience?” Shared risk with artists, smart pricing, and real community—those are the levers, not wishful thinking.
If the last decade was about persuading the wider world that festivals mattered, the new act is about who gets to lead them. Kirby is frank about that, too. The 2025 program, she said, was her answer to the rolling backlash against DEI. “What’s my little superpower?” she asked. “To lift up those whose voices aren’t being heard but are doing amazing things.” She curated a Native American woman building a forward-looking arts festival, a West African founder with a global playbook, a salute to women who have been holding entire ecosystems together in plain sight. “Not everyone likes it,” she said. “If they don’t want to come, they don’t have to.”
FestForums is not a place you attend to be seen; it’s where you go to see—to take in the full chain of custody, from a curator’s spreadsheet to a city’s police scanner to the artist who makes the night worth it. That clarity has turned a boutique convening into a quiet metronome for the business. And it’s coming back: February 11–13, 2026, again at Santa Barbara’s Mar Monte Hotel (FestForums: Attend; Humanitix listing). Expect more mentorship woven into the days, more cross-discipline collisions at night, and a closing ritual Kirby delights in describing: “We always do a champagne toast at the very end,” she said. “Before that, get everybody in the room and say, give us the one thing you’re taking home—and we’ll capture it with AI so you can see the pattern in seconds.” The certainty isn’t the gimmick; it’s the aim. Kirby will keep building a room where festivals take themselves seriously—where the wholesalers of culture meet before culture hits the shelves.
Laurie Kirby Wisdom Bank: Takeaways
Design for consequence, not spectacle. The best festivals leave measurable ripples—policy, partnerships, bookings—not just pretty reels.
Know your tribe or lose your plot. Niche festivals win when they program for identity over scale.
You can’t out-market a bad audience fit. The first question is still “Who’s in the room?”—for fans, partners, and sponsors.
Share the risk, share the reward. Sustainable deals balance artist fees, promoter margins, and audience value.
Make the hallways count. Curate the off-stage collisions—mentoring labs, drill-downs, salons—where the real work happens.
Elevate the wholesalers of culture. Give programmers, buyers, and city partners a room to compare notes before the world gets the goods.
Keep the ritual. A clear close—like a collective “one big takeaway”—turns talk into intent and intent into action.