Established in 1975, the New Jersey Folk Festival is the oldest continuously run folk festival in the State of New Jersey. Managed by a small team of Rutgers undergraduate students, the festival attracts over 20,000 people and is one of the City of New Brunswick's largest regularly scheduled events.
The mission of the New Jersey Folk Festival is to preserve and protect the music, culture and arts of New Jersey. There are four stages of music, dance, and workshops, a juried craft market, a children's activities area, a delicious array of food choices that offers everything from hamburgers, vegetarian fare, and funnel cake to a wide variety of ethnic foods, a folk marketplace, and a heritage area which offers a close-up look at each year's cultural or geographical theme or other appropriate exhibits.
Each year the festival strives for diversity in selecting performers, not only seeking out traditional "American" artists, but also reaching out via fieldwork to the many ethnic communities found within New Jersey. The annual ethnic or regional feature contributes an essential intimate connection to these varied cultural groups represented in the state's population.
The New Jersey Folk Festival is professionally supervised by its Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Angus Kress Gillespie, and by its Associate Director, Erin Clarke, a former NJFF staff member and Rutgers University alumna.
