Downtown Urban Arts Festival (DUAF) is an annual multi-disciplinary arts event held during the spring at renowned venues in New York City. DUAF presents the best of new groundbreaking performance and visual art from storytellers from America’s burgeoning multicultural landscape and from around the world who share their stories that interpret our history and our times.

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CREATIVE. VIBRANT. PASSIONATE. These words aptly describe the past performances, as well as the future direction, of DUAF. Its founding program is its Theater series, formerly known as Downtown Urban Theater Festival/DUTF, which was created in 2001 with the purpose to build a repertoire of new American theatre that echoes the true spirit of urban life and speaks to a whole new generation whose lives defy categorizing along conventional lines. That purpose has been realized many times over, as 200 writers have created and refined their work for the stage and thousands of inspired audience members have applauded their performances. Theater was inaugurated in 2002 at the HERE Arts Center in SoHo to help revitalize the NYC downtown arts scene, which was experiencing a severe downturn due to the WTC disaster. Theater has been recognized as “one of the world’s best festivals for new works” and described as “not only prestigious, but a slice of heaven for playwrights who want the chance to freely express themselves.” (Lisa Mulcahy, Theater Festivals, Allworth Press, 2005)