PATHWAYS
Pathways are thematic focus areas that organize related breakout sessions and incubators around a shared topic. Each pathway is developed by a dedicated Pathway Committee composed of subject matter experts from across the country who are shaping the content, learning goals, and session design for their area of focus.
AFTACON is designed for choice. You’ll select incubators and ARTventures in advance when you register, while breakout sessions will be chosen on site, allowing you to adapt your schedule in real time. You can dive deeply into a single pathway for a more immersive experience—or mix and match breakout sessions across pathways to explore multiple topics throughout the week.
What’s Included in Each Pathway:
- Three breakout sessions (selected on site)
- One full-day incubator: immersive experiences hosted in Albuquerque’s arts and culture venues (selected in advance)
- Content designed to respond to current field needs
- Diverse perspectives and meaningful learning exchange
Below is an overview of each pathway to help you design an experience aligned with your interests, goals, and curiosity.
Action and Advocacy
The Action and Advocacy pathway focuses on a coordinated, equity‑centered arts advocacy approach that builds shared resources, strengthens cross‑sector partnerships, and equips administrators, artists, and advocates with clear strategies, common purpose, and actionable tools to navigate evolving political, social, and funding conditions.
Arts, Humanities, and Community Vitality
The Arts, Humanities, and Community Vitality pathway highlights how artists, humanists, cultural institutions, and civic leaders collaborate across disciplines to strengthen community vibrancy, civic health, shared purpose, and economic resilience through integrated arts, humanities, heritage, and cultural practices.
Arts and Economic Sustainability
The Arts and Economic Sustainability pathway explores how arts and culture navigate economic systems to build long-term resilience. Participants examine funding, advocacy, and decision-making beyond grants; learn to communicate value across sectors; and strengthen the ecosystems, partnerships, and strategies artists and organizations need to adapt, endure, and shape sustainable economic futures.
Arts Education
The Arts Education pathway focuses on coalitions, actions, and solutions that further strengthen our communities by centering the role of arts education in shaping a more equitable future. This pathway, curated for and by artists, administrators, and advocates, advances practical strategies for navigating challenges such as funding shifts, censorship, educator burnout and inequitable access to achieve positive lasting change.
Arts in Civic Life
The Arts in Civic Life pathway explores how arts and culture operate as essential civic infrastructure, building belonging, trust, and shared responsibility by bringing artists, administrators, and advocates together as co-stewards of public life – embedding creativity into how communities and places plan, care for one another, and imagine their futures.
Nonprofit Strategy
The Nonprofit Strategy pathway confronts the realities of running arts nonprofits in 2026—where some old models are broken and “best practices” no longer work. This pathway explores leadership, governance, revenue, and program strategies that foster greater resilience and sustainability, support artists, staff, and communities, and center honesty, experimentation, and possibility.
Creative Work, Agency, and Technology
The Creative Work, Agency, and Technology pathway explores the fault lines shaping the future of creative work—artist agency, institutional risk, audience change, and technological disruption. It challenges the arts to stop inheriting technology and workforce shifts and start shaping it, centering artists as leaders in defining what comes next.
Empowering Rural Arts and Culture
The Empowering Rural Arts and Culture Pathway centers rural creativity, context, and lived experience as foundational to the national arts ecosystem. Rural artists, administrators, and advocates will share stories, build collective power, and be empowered to strengthen the arts in their communities. This pathway will foster resource exchanges, deepen field-wide cohesion, and reinforce the vital role of rural arts and culture in the broader cultural landscape.
Readiness, Response and Community Care
The Readiness, Response, and Community Care Pathway helps help attendees align their organization or practice’s internal readiness with their outward purpose . You already hold many of the insights needed to shape what happens before, during and after disruptive events so that crises don’t have to derail you or your community.
PATHWAY COMMITTEES
Our Pathway Committee members were selected for their deep expertise across the field and serve as thought leaders guiding the development of AFTACON’s nine content pathways.
Working in close collaboration with the AFTA team, they have helped shape the conference by designing breakouts and incubators that challenge assumptions, expand possibilities, and introduce a wide range of models and perspectives that help the field imagine new futures.
We encourage you to connect with them during the conference in Albuquerque.