EdFest: Fifteen Shows, One Shared Send-Off, One Jess Ducey
Jess Ducey is a community builder. Someone who identifies a need and a want before others realize they need and want it too. This is a special attribute to have. A characteristic that unifies, comes from love, and is authentic These are values I respect and hold dear. They are also the values within a person that is attractive.
Before the chaos of Edinburgh, before the flyering and the packed schedules and the scramble to be seen, Jess Ducey is giving 15 Fringe-bound productions something rare: a room, an audience, and a community. That is the spirit behind EdFest, the Brooklyn Art Haus festival Ducey curates and produces through Duces Wild. Running July 14–19, 2026, the festival offers New York audiences a first look at original work headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe — from comedy, clown, cabaret, and immersive theatre to drama, stand-up, music, and experimental performance. It also reflects Ducey’s wider life as an arts administrator and international community-builder.
For Ducey, EdFest is less a showcase than a philosophy. “The Fringe is magical, but it’s also expensive and can be overwhelming,” they said. “EdFest is an experiment in collective ways of sharing the risk of creating art — and hopefully making some friends along the way.”
Ducey knows the strange mix of wonder and overwhelm that comes with Edinburgh. After taking shows there in 2022 and 2023, they understood how easily artists can arrive alone in a city full of possibility. EdFest is their answer to that feeling: build the circle before anyone gets on the plane.
“The important thing is the people and the relationships,” Ducey said. What stayed with them after last year’s festival was not only the shows, but the artists finding each other afterward — cheering on reviews, showing up in audiences, and crossing paths in courtyards across the city. That, they said, was “heartwarming and worth it.”
That belief gives the festival its emotional center. EdFest is about performance, yes, but it is also about making the lonely parts of producing feel less lonely.
This belief is deeper than just the festival. Ducey has been cultivating relationships in their travels. Whether being in arts organizations, the peace corps, doing humanitarian efforts, gathering a group to sell out a film festival in New Zealnd, Ducey is about the collective.
This year’s EdFest features 15 productions selected from more than 40 applications, including Notes from a Narcissistic Negro and Other N Words. Each show receives a one-night-only Brooklyn preview before heading to Scotland in August.
The lineup is deliberately wide-ranging. Across the week, audiences will find work about identity, race, grief, love, family, body image, memory, belonging, resilience, and the search for human connection. Some pieces invite participation; others lean into solo performance, live music, absurdity, or confession.
For Ducey, the curation is personal. When a voice feels urgent, they listen. Speaking about work centered on survival and reclamation, Ducey said, “If there are voices that really need to be heard, I’m like, yes. I want to hear from an older Black woman survivor. That’s vital.”
They connected that urgency to their own healing. “I’m a few years out of an emotionally abusive relationship,” Ducey said, “and there’s a part of me that selfishly wants to hear from someone who is further along in that journey than me.”
That is where EdFest becomes more than programming. It becomes a way of imagining a future. “That’s why art matters,” Ducey said. “Art makes you feel not alone. Art helps you imagine a different world, a different future. It helps you take everything that’s broken and find something better in it.”
Ducey’s producing style is practical, even humble, shaped by years of working in and around artist communities across the world, especially in New Zealand. They describe themself as a “spreadsheet producer,” not a “checkbook producer” — an arts administrator who can find the grant, the room, the form, the budget, or the missing step between a good idea and a real event.
“What I contribute to a group is looking for the last gap between this idea and this idea being a reality,” Ducey said.
That administrative gift was sharpened abroad. In New Zealand, Ducey found themself in a vibrant artist ecosystem of drag performers, poets, comics, cabaret artists, and experimental makers. They were often the person who knew how to turn enthusiasm into infrastructure: booking space, coordinating people, building budgets, supporting applications, and creating the conditions for artists to take creative risks.
That global experience gives EdFest its particular texture. Ducey is not simply presenting shows; they are building the scaffolding around artists so the work can travel, grow, and find its people. The festival’s sense of generosity comes from someone who has spent years learning that art needs more than talent to survive. It needs administration, advocacy, and care.
That instinct follows Ducey across their work, including Down to Clown, a new-work community for clown, comedy, and experimental artists testing pieces between a five-minute bit and a full-length show. Ducey loves that messy middle stage: the moment when an artist is brave enough to put “raw insides on the stage” and see what grows.
EdFest carries that same spirit at a larger scale. It lets artists test the room before Edinburgh, and it lets audiences encounter the work before the festival machine begins. Ducey joked that it also gives them a head start: “I’m going to land and be like, I already saw it.”
For audiences, the invitation is simple: come see the work before the rest of the world catches up. For artists, the invitation is deeper: you do not have to make the journey alone.
EdFest runs July 14–19, 2026, at Brooklyn Art Haus, 24 Marcy Avenue. Most of all, it offers a vision of theatre as a collective act — one stage, one shared audience, and one new friendship at a time.
The 15 EdFest Show
Star Vehicle
Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall
Emoji: The Hieroglyphs of Our Time...
Olivia Raine Atwood: Oops
Marina di Marzo: Love in the Time of Fifth Grade
Dr Kara Kibara – The Love Guru
Japanese Grandma Funeral
Ethan & Gigi Present: THE MOVEMENT
Channel
NOTES from a NARCISSISTIC NEGRO & Other N Words
Jerk Off!
I WAS NEVER HERE
Fool As Hell
The Van Gogh Shogh
Atticwife
Click HERE for more information.
Editorial by Malini Singh McDonald.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 13, 2026. All rights reserved.