Fairfield University’s Quick Center Unveils 2025-26 Season

Press release

Celebrating 35 Years, Fairfield University’s Quick Center Unveils 2025-26 Season

Featuring global thought leaders, groundbreaking artists, and world-class performers, Fairfield University’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts presents a 2025–26 season of inspiring performances, lectures, and new works.

FAIRFIELD, Conn. (July 7, 2025)—Fairfield University’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts is thrilled to announce its 2025-26 season of live performances, lectures, screenings of The Met: Live in HD and National Theatre Live, and much more. Each of the more than 40,000 people who make up our annual audience is bound to find something to excite, enlighten, and entertain.

This year’s schedule kicks off with our 28th season of Open VISIONS Forum, the always popular series of engaging and informative dialogues with thought leaders and changemakers from around the globe. Featured speakers include: CNN Anchor and Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins; civic leader, speaker, and author Eboo Patel, PhD, the founder and president of Interfaith America; American conservative political strategist and writer Scott Jennings; philosopher John Tasioulas, director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford; The New York Times bestselling author and former Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi; Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer Ken Burns. In addition, audiences can look forward to a full OVF: Espresso line-up, including historians Edward Aldrich and Caroline A. Maguire, humorist and author Gina Barreca, and journalist and film critic Elizabeth Weitzman.

In addition to our Open VISIONS Forum offerings, audiences can anticipate sharing creative and intellectual experiences live on stage and screened from the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre in London. With a season that is bigger and better than ever, the Quick remains committed to keeping ticket prices accessible for the whole community. Many of our live performances and lecture tickets are only $35, or $25 for Quick Members.

Season highlights include:

Kristina Wong in #FoodBankInfluencer (Friday, Sept. 12, 2025): Acclaimed playwright, performer, and self-proclaimed “Food Bank Influencer,” Kristina Wong shares irreverent commentary while illuminating American food insecurity and the subsequent national pastime that is collecting and giving away free food. Wong is a Doris Duke Award Winner, Guggenheim Fellow, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama. Earlier in the week, the Quick will partner with the Marion Peckham Egan School of Nursing and Health Studies and community partners to share additional opportunities to connect with Kristina Wong and learn more about how each person can make a difference in our own community to support those experiencing food insecurity.

John Pizzarelli and The Swing 7 (Friday, Oct. 3, 2025): Grammy Award-winner, guitarist, and singer John Pizzarelli has been hailed by the Boston Globe for “reinvigorating the Great American Songbook and re-popularizing jazz.” He’s expanded his repertoire to include the music of Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and many more for an unforgettable evening of toe-tapping fun.

Manual Cinema: Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster (Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025): Using hundreds of puppets both paper and furry, two-dimensional props, narration, and song, the Emmy-winning performance collective Manual Cinema brings Mo Willems’ popular books to life for audiences young and old. The simple act of attending the cinema comes alive with this inventive troupe’s playful use of scale, live feed cameras, music ensemble, ingenuity, and theatricality.

Avant Premiere: Emily Carson Coates: The Scattering (Thursday, Oct. 9 & Friday, Oct. 10, 2025): Dancer and choreographer Emily Coates is a Quick Center artist in residence who has been sharing the evolution of her work with audiences since March 2024. This performance project draws on legendary choreographer George Balanchine’s life and work beginning with his arrival in America in 1933, and Coates’ own background as a former member of the New York City Ballet. Coates and her collaborators—director Ain Gordon, performer Derek Lucci, musician-composer Charles Burnham, and pianist Melvin Chen—collage Balanchine’s archival traces, including his Connecticut connections.

Silkroad Ensemble with Wu Man: American Railroad (Friday, Nov. 7, 2025): The The Transcontinental Railroad transformed America’s landscape and the way its residents shared both goods and ideas from coast to coast. While profit-seeking corporations and the government financed it, this captivating musical program centers on the people who built the railroad and whose lives were it most deeply impacted—including Indigenous and African Americans, as well as Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrant laborers.

Drum Tao (Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026): Since 1993, Drum Tao performances have touched more than nine million spectators around the world. They feature “Wadaiko” or Taiko for short: large, unique-sounding Japanese drums, as well as Japanese flutes and harps. This high-energy performance art combines music, dance, martial arts, and culture with power, speed, and synchronicity. “Extraordinarily talented percussion artists, and seductive alluring performers.” (Chicago Tribune)

BODYTRAFFIC (Friday, Feb. 20, 2026): BODYTRAFFIC is a world-class contemporary dance company led by artistic director Tina Finkelman Berkett known internationally for its Los Angeles-grown, contagious vivacity. Founded in 2007, BODYTRAFFIC returns to the Quick, continuing to push boundaries and establish Los Angeles as a city known for dance. The company is deeply committed to producing acclaimed works by distinctive choreographic voices, all while surging to the forefront of the contemporary dance world.

Eileen Ivers and the Universal Roots (Sunday, March 1, 2026): Grammy-winning, Emmy-nominated Eileen Ivers continues to redefine the fiddling tradition, taking it from a folk music staple to a fiercely fresh, powerfully beautiful, intensely driving world stage experience. Having performed with Sting, ‘Fiddlers 3’ with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Regina Carter, Patti Smith, Al Di Meola, and The Chieftains, Ivers was a musical standout in the groundbreaking Riverdance, a founding member of Cherish the Ladies, and one of the most awarded All-Ireland Fiddle and Banjo champions ever.

The Quick Center continues its popular 2025-26 circus season featuring top American and international artists:

Quebec’s Cirque Kikasse in Sante! (Friday, Oct. 24, 2025): You’ve heard of dinner and a show—now experience circus and a food truck.

Minty Fresh Circus by Monique Martin (Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026): This newly created American circus company is a raucous, playful reimagination of circus and dance that infuses African performance rituals, ceremonies, and cultural traditions.

Janoah Bailin in meSSeS (Saturday, April 11, 2026): meSSeS features precarious unicycling, shimmering puppetry, jaw-dropping juggling, and mesmerizing motions created by Maine-based Janoah the Jester. Part performance, part workshop, and entirely entertaining!

Find details about dozens of additional upcoming live performances and
lectures at quickcenter.com, where you can also become a Quick Member. For more information, contact the Quick Center Box Office at 203-254-4010, Monday through Friday, from 12 to 4:30 p.m.