Call for Participation to the 2025 IA National Gathering

Featured Artwork ‘Destino Manifesto’ by Citlali Delgado*, Visual Artist for the IA 2025 National Gathering

Submissions are due on Monday June 30, 2025.
Submissions are not restricted to IA Member institutions; all are welcome to apply.

The Call for Participation to the 2025 IA National Gathering Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want is now open! Organized in partnership with New Mexico State University and a local steering committee, the 2025 IA National Gathering will be held in Las Cruces, New Mexico on October 3-5, 2025. 

The 2025 IA National Gathering invites participants to join us in celebrating Imagining America’s 25th anniversary and to reflect on the ways we provide passage for one another, create havens for safety, and practice connective ways of being together that fortify us during this unprecedented moment in history and for the journey ahead. We especially welcome attention to how art making, creative culture, performance, storytelling, and testimonios provide passage for mutual understanding and collective liberation, and make it possible to move towards the seemingly impossible. 

I have had the privilege of visiting Las Cruces and New Mexico State University last month to learn about the incredible Paso del Norte region from scholar and National Gathering faculty organizer Cynthia Bejarano and attend the inauguration of NMSU’s new President Valerio Ferme. I was moved deeply by the level of compassion I observed among leadership, faculty, staff, students, and local community members. I was soothed by the serene and welcoming atmosphere of the NMSU campus, which is framed by the dramatic Organ Mountains and expansive desert landscape. It already feels like the perfect place for us to gather together in community this fall.

Stephanie Maroney

Managing Director, Imagining America

The 2025 IA National Gathering will explore questions related to the theme of providing passage, uplift work in the borderlands of Las Cruces and the Paso del Norte, and celebrate Imagining America’s 25th anniversary. An IA-curated track will showcase timely work from the IA network, and offer a participatory deliberative space for conference participants to engage in creative dialogue, reflection, strategy, and cultural production surrounding shared concerns and hopes for surviving, thriving, resisting, and building in these times. 

Read the full Call for Participation here and learn more about proposal formats and submission instructions. Submissions are due June 30, 2025.

To learn more about the submission process, review the video and slide presentation from the virtual information session with IA Staff .

* Citlali Delgado is a visual artist from El Paso, Texas with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New Mexico State University. Based in the borderlands, her paintings function to understand how she and her community can live with, against, and past the border. As a Chicana, she embodies pro-migrant and immigrant values through representation of Latino and feminist multiplicity to ultimately encourage critical resistance and liberation. She has attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art residency program and has work in the Eastern New Mexico University and the New Mexico State University Museum permanent collections. She has shown at the El Paso Museum of Art Border Biennial, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez Bienal Fronteriza, and the Ecos del Sol exhibition at the Museum of the Big Bend.