Bloomington PRIDE Film Festival 2015

Saturday, January 31 at 10:30 PM
Come prepared to dance the night away with our epic all-ages dance party.

The mission of Bloomington PRIDE: Through community-based events and services, Bloomington PRIDE celebrates queer arts, creates safe and inclusive spaces, and challenges stereotypes to enrich LGBTQA community culture.

Founded in 2003 by two IU Arts Administration graduate students, the Bloomington PRIDE Film Festival was an instant success, embraced by the LGBTQA and general Bloomington communities alike. Strong support from local businesses, the IU GLBT Alumni Association, the Bloomington Convention & Visitors Center, and hundreds of residents and visitors make PRIDE an annual event that everyone looks forward to.

For ten years, PRIDE has flourished as a film festival exploring a wide variety of issues and situations involving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. PRIDE programs a variety of live performance, lecture, public participation events, and films that express a wide range of viewpoints and feature many different personality types and situations, advocating community-wide attitudes of awareness, acceptance, and appreciation of diversity. The goals of the festival are to educate and strengthen the local community and celebrate artistic talent and achievement.

At its ten-year anniversary, the PRIDE Film Festival announced in January 2013 that it will incorporate into a free-standing nonprofit organization to expand programming and better serve the LGBTQ community. A volunteer Steering Committee made up of community members, Indiana University students and faculty, artists, film enthusiasts, and others plans the festival, led by two co-directors. The volunteer Board of Directors manages the administrative activities of the emerging nonprofit called Bloomington PRIDE.

In April 2014, Bloomington PRIDE expanded its reach to include an annual summer festival with live bands, poetry, drag performances, food, panel discussions, and educational workshops on topics most interesting to the LGBTQ community. Then, in July 2014 Prism Youth Community became Bloomington PRIDE’s first program dedicated to serving queer youth between the ages of 12-20.  Currently, PRIDE is the umbrella organization for one ongoing program and two special events.

The Buskirk-Chumley Theater graciously served as PRIDE’s fiscal sponsor from January 2013 until September 2014 when we received great news from the IRS to become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.