The Living Traditions Festival is an annual public folklife festival organized by the Salt Lake City Arts Council. First held in the mid-1980s, the festival brings together cultural communities from across Utah through traditional music, dance, craft, foodways, storytelling, and other forms of expressive culture. The festival has long served as a venue for artists and community organizations to share cultural practices with broader publics while also strengthening connections within their own communities.

In 2026, Salt Lake City celebrated the festival’s fortieth anniversary. That year’s festival included local cultural organizations and artists as well as collaborations with the Utah Division of Arts and Museums and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Programming emphasized cultural understanding, belonging, and the ways traditional arts connect communities to history, place, and one another.

Living Traditions in Utah: Voices and Oral Histories began in May 2025 as a Fife Folklore Archives fieldwork and oral history initiative connected to the festival. While the project emerged from the Salt Lake City festival, its scope is broader than the annual event itself. The project documents the experiences, histories, and cultural work of participating artists, performers, tradition bearers, organizers, and community members, with attention to the larger networks of family, migration, faith, language, labor, memory, and community life that sustain these traditions beyond the festival setting.