Luminato Festival

Date(s): June 4 to 22, 2025
Location: Toronto

Toronto has an amazing array of arts festivals throughout the year, but only Luminato Festival is uniquely attuned to the city’s avant-garde vibes. Luminato blends performance art, visual arts, live music and interactive exhibits into a two-week spectacular.

In 2007, Luminato kicked off with over 1,500 artists whose work appeared in dozens of venues throughout Toronto, including festival-specific works commissioned from Monty Python member Eric Idle.

Other Luminato highlights from years past include headliner events featuring Rufus Wainwright, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Amal Clooney, David Byne, and the North American premiere of a documentary about artist Marina Abramović.

This year’s theme is DAY:NIGHT, which explores how we inhabit the city in a 24-hour cycle. From dusk to dawn and dawn to dusk, any given day can be ordinary or extraordinary—locals and visitors are invited to encounter Toronto differently.

2025 Luminato Festival highlights include: Nadya Kwandibens’ Night/Shifts, which captures the lives of Toronto’s night workers and displays them across the TTC, Justin Gray’s Immersed, an audio experience blending Indian classical music, jazz, and electronic soundscapes, and Lulaworld, celebrating Latin and Indigenous music.

Luminato is also designed to showcase some of Toronto’s hidden gems, sprinkling happenings throughout the city and emphasizing Canadian artists.

It even commissions hundreds of works from throughout the country to appear at the city’s museums and galleries, parks, theatres, and public forums.