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Tomorrow, Jun. 11 New York welcomes its first all-female festival, The Other Festival. Set at Spring Studios in Tribeca, the festival celebrates strong female entrepreneurs and will be a day of inspirational talks by women such as Naomi Campbell and Rosario Dawson as well as a strong musical program, kicked off at 6:00 PM by Isaac likes Jenny. Throughout the night several other talented musicians will take the stage such as DJ Kitty Cash and Jojo Abot. See the complete schedule for both the talks and concerts here.
Founded by Dee Poku-Spalding, who also runs a social enterprise WIE that focuses on women and supporting women in their careers, she wanted to create a festival to show that female-driven bands and talkers can draw just as big crowds as male-driven headlines. While attending a festival in 2015, she was surprised to see so many male-driven bands perform for a female heavy audience.
“I thought to myself ‘there’s a bit of a disconnect here, why aren’t there more women on stage?’. And once I started looking into it a bit more, what I found was something like 75% of bands booked for local festivals are male or male-driven bands,” Poku-Spalding said.
And so The Other Festival was slowly born, a festival for women by women in an effort to promote sisterhood and show that a female-driven festival can draw just as big crowds as male-driven ones.
“I wanted to do something to support the desire to create companies and to support that kind of self-starter generation,” she said. “And those ideas just ended up merging into this one empowering day of music and talk and demos – all designed to celebrate female makers and creators.”
Dee Poku Spalding
It’s not only a day meant to entertain, Poku-Spalding hopes the women walk out feeling a little more confident, and like some of their questions have been answered to keep them going.
“I think it’s a hard world being a founder in. You hear a lot of no’s, you’re putting yourself and your ideas out there,” she said. “I’m hoping that by being surrounded by the women who are present and the women who are on stage, everyone get that sense of support and extra energy to keep going.”
The festival has a strong focus on entrepreneurs — in addition to aspiring photographers, designers and musicians — and along with the talks and concert the festival has set up the SMART SHOP Village, where they can showcase their work and get a chance to connect with the attendees.
“It’s for anyone who has creative ideas and wants to act on them, really,” Poku-Spalding said. And what better place than New York to celebrate these ideas?
“New York has that energy, it just makes you feel like you can conquer and you can be and do anything you want.” she said. “It really is the home of makers. Everyone here is doing something, creating something, innovating in some way.”