Cleveland Humanities Festival

The Cleveland Humanities Festival is a collaborative event celebrating the great cultural institutions of the city of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, dedicated to humanistic inquiry.

The theme of the 2025 Cleveland Humanities Festival is FREEDOM. What does it mean to be free? Who gets to claim freedom—and at what cost? Freedom is more than an ideal or slogan—it’s an encounter with competing systems, values, laws and visions of the world. At a time when debates over freedom reveal deep cultural and political divides, we turn our attention to its porous, evolving nature. We’ll examine freedom’s many dimensions: political liberation and civic rights, freedom of expression and imagination, bodily autonomy, spiritual and inner freedom, and the tensions between freedom and responsibility. How have artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders shaped our understanding of it—challenging, expanding, and sometimes upending unexamined assumptions? And what might freedom mean for the future of democratic societies? This year’s Cleveland Humanities Festival invites the public to reflect, imagine, and engage with these pressing questions through a series of public events in the spring of 2026.