The 2025 Common Senses Festival has announced its lineup of events aimed at disability acceptance.

This year’s festival is divided into four tracks: Performing Arts, Science and Technology, Preferred Interests, and Film and Discourse. Each track focuses on the theme of ‘voice’ and features a wide range of programming aimed at promoting acceptance and inclusion of people with disabilities. Offerings range from the world premiere of “Sensorium Ex” by composer Paola Prestini and poet Brenda Shaughnessy, to a retrospective exhibition of AAC devices,  an elevator scavenger hunt, to a screening of Samuel and Dan Habib’s “My Disability Roadmap.”

The opera “Sensorium Ex” features predominantly disabled performers, and incorporates Sensorium AI, a new AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication App. The project is devising new artistic practices which center disability equity and access at all steps in the process: this framework, Sensorium Codex, will be made available to all performing arts institutions. “Sensorium Ex” is supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, and National Sawdust.

Founder and Director of the Common Senses Festival, Kate Noble Weitz explained her vision in a press release by saying, “With the festival, I wanted to make Omaha a better, more accessible, place for my son and his peers. But this is about everyone: people are so much closer to disability than they’re willing to talk about; if you’re lucky to live long enough, your ability to walk may change, your ability to remember may change. I am not a clinician or a scientist, but I know how to curate and put together experiences and bring people together. I’ve always felt that arts are where major cultural shifts start, and so the arts have to be how we change our conversation around disability.”

The Common Senses Festival will take place May 10-25 in Omaha, NE. A full list of events can be found on the Festival’s website.

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