Festival of the Arts Is the One About the Artists, and That Is Why It Still Feels Like Itself

This story is part of EPCOT’s Festival Season, our seven-part guide. Start with the full guide.

January 16 to February 23, 2026.

The Festival of the Arts is the baby of the four. It launched in January 2017, which makes it younger than some of the annual passes I have held, so I cannot stand here and tell you it is not what it used to be. It has not been around long enough to have a “used to be.” What I can tell you, after walking it every January since it started, is that it is the festival that most stubbornly resists the blurring I described in Part 1, and I am fairly sure I know why. It is not built around booths. It is built around people. Specifically, around artists.

Every January I go for one particular reason, and it is the reason I think the whole festival works: I go to see what my favorites have brought this year. That sentence is the entire appeal in miniature. The festival fills World Showcase with artist tents and open-air galleries, and it turns its featured artists into something you can follow the way you follow a band across albums. You learn a name, a piece stops you, and then the next winter you come back specifically to see where that person went with it. Dylan Bonner, returning for his sixth year in 2026 with his Disney princess work across prints, comics, and fine art, is exactly that kind of fixture. You start to recognize the hands before you read the placards.

For me, the artist I look for first is James Coleman. A great deal of the festival is Disney-themed art, and I genuinely love a lot of it, but Coleman is the one whose work stopped me precisely because it was not really Disney at all. He spent years inside the Disney studios as a background painter, the person who builds the world the characters move through, and then he took that training and made something entirely his own out of it. His landscapes are luminous and light-soaked, more concerned with the way late-afternoon sun falls through a stand of trees than with any castle or character. Standing in front of one, you would never guess it came out of an animation studio, and that is the point. Every January I want to see what he brought this time, and which direction the light went in his newest work. That is the pull of this festival distilled down to a single name. You are not there for a franchise. You are there for one person’s eye, and for how it moved since last winter.

The rest of the festival is arranged around that same conviction, that art is something you make and meet in person, not just something you photograph and scroll past. The Animation Academy sits you down at a desk to draw a character while a Disney artist walks the whole room through it, line by line. Interactive murals let you add your own brushstroke to a piece that fills in over the festival’s run, so the finished thing is the sum of six weeks of strangers. The Food Studios, which are the festival’s version of the booths, treat plating as seriously as flavor, so a dish arrives looking like a small deliberate composition before you are allowed to ruin it by eating it. Even the merchandise leans into working artists rather than generic seasonal logos.

In the evenings, the Disney on Broadway Concert Series brings genuine stage performers, many of them people who originated roles in the actual shows, to the America Gardens Theatre to sing the songs they are known for. And Figment, the little purple dragon who has been EPCOT’s mascot of imagination since 1983, has quietly become the face of the whole event, which could not be more fitting for a festival about making things up and making them by hand. He turns up in the merchandise, the photo ops, and a scavenger hunt that walks families past art they might otherwise breeze by.

There is a practical reason to love these particular weeks, too. Cooler winter air and the lightest crowds of EPCOT’s whole festival year make January and February the most pleasant stretch to actually walk World Showcase, and that matters more than it sounds, because it means you can stand in front of a Coleman canvas without a line pressing at your back. But the deeper reason Arts still feels distinct is structural. It never leaned on the booth loop for its identity in the first place. It leaned on craft, and on the specific people who make it, and craft does not homogenize the way a menu does. Two painters given the same prompt make two different paintings. Two booths given the same prompt make the same booth. If you want proof that an EPCOT festival can still hold a shape entirely its own, this is the one to see. It is the counter-example to everything that follows.