• Spend a year learning with the people and places that matter most to you.

  • Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Display At Peacham Acoustic Music Festival, 2022

  • Most Costly Journey Exhibit

  • Vermont Pride Plaque Dedication

  • The Young Tradition Festival Student/Mentor Showcase

Read our 2024 Impact Report, Vermont Folklife at 40, to learn about our recent programs, partnerships, and accomplishments.

Tradition, Innovation, and Culture

Vermont Folklife’s mission is to deepen our understanding of each other by engaging with communities across the state to document and share everyday expressions of tradition, innovation, and culture.

Vermont Folklife builds programs around community concerns and our partners’ expertise. We root our work with educators, students, traditional artists and musicians, researchers, and non-profit professionals in the process of collaborative ethnographic inquiry, seeking to understand experience from the perspective of the people to whom an experience belongs. 

Through techniques such as interviewing, cultural documentation and media production, we recognize every individual in Vermont as valuable and significant, as an expert in their own arenas of activity, as creative, smart, and capable. No one is on the margins; no one is dismissible.

Explore Vermont Folklife

Where to Find Us

Vermont Folklife shares events, exhibits, and workshops across the state. Our offices are not open to the public, however our staff are actively working in communities around Vermont. To see what we’ve been up to lately, please visit our blog or check out our newsletter.

Vermont Folklife exhibits are displayed at a range of locations around the state. To see where we have exhibits on display at the moment, visit our exhibits page or events calendar.

Elements of our Archive are available online through our digital archive. For all other inquiries, please email Archivist Andy Kolovos.

Make a donation.

For nearly 40 years, Vermont Folklife has been the only statewide organization dedicated to documenting and sharing the diverse cultures of Vermont—sustaining our folklife, our way of life. 

Please help us continue this work.

A group of people standing at either side of. along table with empty wooden bowls and flowers in front of them on the table.