Capital Fringe Festival Ends After 20 Years

Capital Fringe has announced that it will no longer produce the annual Fringe Festival after twenty years. Since its inception in 2005, Capital Fringe has been a cornerstone of Washington, DC's arts community, fostering creativity and collaboration through its annual open-access Fringe Festival and year-round programming.

Over the years, Capital Fringe has engaged 87,000 artists and attracted 497,000 audience members, generated $3,294,714 in artists revenue. Fringe programming efforts have brought the arts to hundreds of established venues as well as vacant properties throughout Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Downtown, and Georgetown. From our founding of operating out of a vacant Italian restaurant, Fringe has achieved remarkable milestones, including raising capital and operating funds to establish a permanent home for the region's small theater community and independent artists.

The decision to cease producing the annual Fringe Festival is the result of years of mounting obstacles that have only been addressed with short-term solutions. Operating a small to mid-sized arts organization in Washington, DC, requires constantly overcoming challenges to secure space. Over the past three years, these challenges have been further compounded by rising costs and the difficulty of obtaining suitable and reliable venue options annually to support the unique open-access programming. Unfortunately, there is no apparent long-term solution to this trend, and to continue to fight this battle annually is not sustainable.

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