Vision Festival

The Vision Festival is the world's premier festival of experimental music (typically free jazz/avant-garde jazz), art, film and dance. Inspired by the 1984 and '88 Sound Unity Festivals. It was a direct out growth of the Improvisors Collective 1994 and '95. In 1996, Dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker, initiated the First Annual Vision Festival. This festival is held annually in Lower East Side of New York City, in June. Other members of the Board of Directors include: Lewis Barnes, Jo Wood Brown, Whit Dickey, William Parker, John Schiek, and Bradford K. Smith. It usually consists of between thirty and sixty performances, spread out over a number of days.

The festival has taken place in numerous venues, including a church basement, a youth center, the Angel Orensanz Center for the Arts the Knitting Factory and CBGB. Festival organizers sometimes encounter difficulty booking performance spaces, largely because of the Vision Festival's rejection of commercial sponsors. Booking difficulties are often alleviated by arts-foundation grants, however.