With Love of Liberation and Community, or How Laila Fakhoury is Building a Cultural Movement in the American South
The 27-year-old event producer, creative curator, activist, and community organizer living in Gainesville, Florida, is guided by her Palestinian roots as she organizes the third annual Big: Culture & Arts Festival.
By Tyler Francischine
Photos by RütsLaila Fakhoury is proof that you don’t have to set up shop in a metropolis like L.A. or New York to build an artistic and cultural movement. It just takes love, sweat and focus.
The 27-year-old event producer, creative curator, activist and community organizer is largely responsible for the sea change that’s washed over downtown Gainesville — the entertainment, arts and culture hub of a rapidly expanding, Spanish moss-covered college town in north central Florida.
After years (decades, truly) of domination of Gainesville’s music and nightlife scenes by those who solely favor acoustic, punk, experimental and other rocks, now there’s something else going on. If Laila organized the night, you’re probably safe betting there will be live music, a DJ or seven and food from international vendors, not to mention a market, fashion show, car show and/or skate jam. Let’s not forget Laila’s favorite part: the people of every scene, silo and persuasion milling about, co-mingling and drinking in the experience.
On paper, she’s co-owner of How Bazar, downtown Gainesville’s worker-owned apparel store, nightlife venue, and third place; co-owner of Dion Dia Records, an independent record label based in Gainesville and Miami; producer of Big: Culture & Arts Festival, which celebrates its third iteration this April 11-13, 2025 in downtown Gainesville; and the former president of the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
In person, she’s usually calm, cool and collected, down to every coiffed curl or curated outfit, but make no mistake: that mind’s running a mile a minute. These days, she’s in the throes of planning Big, which promises to envelop attendees and artists like Elijah Fox, Pearl & the Oysters, The Alchemist, Annabelle Kline, Navy Blue, Pink Siifu, MIKE and many Gainesville and Florida-based acts in a circus-like atmosphere. Imagine clowns, fire breathers, cabaret performers, a fashion show, an indoor skatepark, a drive-in movie theater, and a wellness bubble offering massage, acupuncture, and yoga and art workshops housed in a womb-like installation created by Annabelle Schneider.
WOOO spoke with Laila from her couch on a rainy Sunday afternoon in mid-March, just one month before Big: Culture & Arts Festival takes downtown Gainesville by storm:
I’d like to start by borrowing a tool from your tool kit. You’ve been known to begin meetings with an ice breaker that encourages self-reflection and creative expression. So, my icebreaker for you is: what are three adjectives you’d use to describe yourself?
Laila: “Creative. Connected. Empathetic.”
I couldn’t agree more. Now, let’s dive into what’s currently on your plate. We’re a few weeks out from the third annual Big: Culture & Arts Festival, which you’ve described in promotional materials as “experiential cultural theater.” What is your vision for Big, and what separates it from other music festivals?
Laila: “The festival has basically been written into a play, down to every cue. The MC acts as this host guiding us through the experience, but really, they're the narrator of the play. Every act between the music sets, like the circus performers, fire breathers, aerial acts, and clowns, are very carefully planned. For example, there will be this climactic moment during the festival where a fashion show gives way to a flash mob-style circus parade, which goes directly into a circus performance on the main stage, which precedes a high-energy musical performance.
“Big is intentionally made to feel like a journey, and this fashion show moment is a time during the event when, no matter what people are doing or where they are, they'll all flock to one spot and hopefully start to feel the unity and connection between themselves and everyone else there. That’s the purpose of Big: build spaces for people to connect with one another. We want people to leave Big with new friends, feeling inspired by others and exposed to new things they learned they liked.”
Can we characterize the power that undergirds experiences like Big? How does Big leave an impact on a community level and beyond?
Laila: “On a community level, Big is something that people can look forward to every year where they know there'll be a space for them. Sometimes in Gainesville, it can feel like there aren’t large-scale events curated for diverse audiences — we have our football games, our Tom Petty celebrations, things that aren’t necessarily for everyone. So Big is meant to be just that, from relaxing and dreamy indie to hype hip-hop, dance, and R&B. Maybe people who only come to Gainesville for games will see our town in a different way than they did before.
“In terms of economic value, Alachua County staff ran last year’s one-day festival through an economic impact calculator and determined that, in just one day, we brought $325,000 worth of value into Alachua County. So, imagine what we’ll do this year with a two-day festival. People are traveling to Gainesville from Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and all over the state.
“The goal is to make Gainesville, and Alachua County, a sustainable place for arts, culture and entertainment. We want local creatives to be able to sustain themselves here, and we want artists from all over to come here, enjoy the relaxing pace of life, and create. I was just in New York, meeting with Navy Blue’s sister, who manages him, and I was telling her, ‘Gainesville’s going to feel like a warm hug for you.’ For artists living in places that move very quickly and feel sterile and require you to be a little disassociated, Gainesville is this place where you can go to the springs, bike the trails, and meet an artistic community that’s supportive and friendly. If Big can help people find a new place where they can retreat at least once a year, then we’ve done our job.
“Finally, Big is important because it can reopen Florida as an arts and culture hub. Right now, people call Florida a dead zone, and no one wants to tour here. That does a huge disservice to all the young, diverse, creative people in Florida who need this kind of exposure and inspiration. If we can incentivize people to come to Gainesville, which is uniquely situated in the northern part of the state not far from Atlanta, then that automatically opens up Orlando, Tampa and Miami to the south. If we can make Gainesville a place that funnels people into Florida, I think we can overpower the politics that we have here and all the stuff that makes people avoidant of the state.”
I’m always moved by learning that the motivation for your work in event production etc. etc. comes from a commitment to doing the most good for the most people over the pursuit of dollars and cents. What guides your approach to this work?
Laila: “My Palestinian roots are what inform and inspire everything I do. Growing up, when I was in Palestine, I saw a collective culture that’s very different from what you experience here. Everyone supports each other, knows about each other, checks in with each other. Entertainment, and gathering in the name of entertainment, is a huge part of our culture, too. Palestinian people gather to hang out, talk, air grievances and relax together.
“I’ve watched the act of gathering in community build people's resiliency in Palestine and keep people together during struggles. For me, even though I'm in a place now that's completely different — with its individualistic culture and obviously different struggles for different people — I try to bring what I learned to wherever I am. Even if the event I’m curating or putting together isn't necessarily based in Palestinian advocacy, I still draw from the energy and nature of being Palestinian: wanting to connect with people and keep others connected to each other.
“My Palestinian heritage has also made me more driven and always willing to put myself out there to curate these experiences and bring people together. We're almost born that way — we just want to be connectors and help people in any way we can. In some ways, it's difficult, because I put a lot of responsibility on myself to do different types of projects while also trying to be an activist, but I feel like that balance has helped me become a more driven person in general.”
Thank you for sharing that. I wonder, does your identity as a Palestinian person — a member of a group who the world powers are trying to wipe out of existence — influence your penchant for not only curating communal experiences, but documenting and archiving culture for posterity?
Laila: “For us Palestinian people, preservation is a huge thing. Lineage and heritage are really important to us, because they’re our proof of existence. It's the way that we continue to be a part of this world, even though there are all these attempts to destroy and quiet us.
“In building this platform led by people of different backgrounds who have faced and face oppression, [Dion Dia’s co-owners are Jahi and Khary Khalfani, who are Black Americans,] I want all of our identities to be represented in order to show others: we built this from the opposite starting place of where you see power coming from, which is typically white men. We're creating something that’s completely alternative from those usual power structures, and it's led by people who are coming together from different backgrounds of struggle.”
Mashallah. I’d love to take it back to the early days. Were you always one to gather people? What inspired you to become an organizer and cultural curator?
Laila: “I grew up super, super shy. I was awkward, anxious and embarrassed all the time. My mom would try to push me out of that. She'd put me in public speaking classes and tell me, ‘You can't be like this. Especially as a Palestinian woman, you need to be able to be vocal and open. The world needs to be able to hear what you have to say.’
“When I was in sixth grade in Ocala, Florida, [a decently small, mostly white town known for its horse farms and equestrian events,] I remember learning about different historical tragedies like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. I raised my hand and asked, ‘Why don't we learn about Al-Nakba, the catastrophe?’ [The Arabic term refers to the violent displacement and expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and land in order to create Israel, which began in 1948 and continues today.] My teacher was like, ‘I literally have no idea what you're talking about, but if you want to give a presentation to the class, you're welcome to.’
“So, I went home and created all of these trifold, science poster boards where I discussed home demolitions in Palestine, the imprisonment of Palestinians, and how the Israeli military forces everyone to join it at 18 years old. Then, I did a 60-minute presentation for my class. My classmates had all these questions. Growing up in Ocala, no one even knew what Palestine was.
“Later on, in high school, (because we all went to the same school in our small town,) some of my sixth-grade classmates were all in the same history class. Our textbooks didn’t talk about Palestine hardly at all; just one paragraph, which mentioned Hamas. ‘Palestinians are terrorists, and that's all you need to know.’ That’s basically how this teacher taught it. So, all of these students told that teacher, ‘You don't know what you're talking about. You don’t have any real information. You should talk to Laila, because she knows this stuff way better than you do.’ I suddenly got called out of gym class to give another presentation.
“Seeing all my classmates take the knowledge they had learned and feel empowered by it enough to stand up to this teacher was a really impactful moment for me. I was like, ‘OK, I need to continue on this route.’ The next year, I curated and hosted my first event: a screening of a Palestinian film at the College of Central Florida in Ocala.
“When the genocide started in 2023, so many of my former classmates were messaging me, saying, ‘Your presentations were the only reason I know how to stand up to my parents right now,’ or ‘Thank you for opening me up to this, so I could teach myself more information.’”
The phrase “speaking truth to power” never felt more apt. Now that you’ve been planning and executing arts and culture events for half a decade, and you maintain an enormous workload that requires you to constantly make timely decisions and establish priorities among many responsibilities, what are some values that guide your decision making? And how do you define success?
Laila: “In situations where I'm making quick decisions, it comes down to repetition and learning from experience, but also intuition. In deciding on who we’re aligning with, it’s about knowing how people work. I like to really understand who someone is as a person before we bring them in. If that means having to slow down a process or decision, I'm about it. I'm working hard to protect the energy of the festival. It has to be the right people with the right intentions.
“Success for me means that everyone who attends an event enjoys themselves and has a good experience. In the cases where we’re hosting vendors and artists, hearing them say they had a fruitful, beneficial experience that sustained or supported them is a huge form of success to me.”
What do you think is the biggest misconception folks have about life as an event producer and cultural curator?
Laila: “What comes to mind is that people think that we make money, or that we got it like that. With real, community-based stuff, inherently you're gonna spend more than you make, at first especially. Also, sometimes, people who want to help or be involved might think this is way more glamorous than it actually is. It can feel like people only want to be involved for the part they see on Instagram, not the running around and actual effort that it takes to make these things happen. In reality, it’s hard work, complete with stress, anxiety, and your own money and resources on the line. People may not always recognize how much goes into it mentally, emotionally and physically.”
I’m curious: when your life demands you spend a lot of time thinking about the future, how do you reconnect with the present moment?
Laila: “Sometimes, I get so in my head thinking about things that need to be done or the future that it can paralyze me. In those cases, I have to zoom in and ask myself, ‘What am I trying to do right now? What is the thing that I need to get through so that it opens up my mind to all the other things?’
“Admittedly, I don't have many mindfulness practices. Going to the gym is the day-by-day thing that helps me stay present. Cooking is my time to slow down and relax. If I know I have a bunch of stuff that I gotta get done, but I'm so stressed and overwhelmed about it that I'm not going to be productive anyway, I'm just like, ‘You know what? I'm gonna cook some soup.’ I make my soup, and I feel so much better.”
Well, now I gotta ask: what’s your favorite soup?
Laila: “I love any kind of lentil soup. There's this Arabic soup called adas, which is red lentils blended with carrot and parsley. You gotta put a lot of lemon in. I love that junk.”
Presented by Dion Dia and How Bazar with support from Visit Gainesville Alachua County, the third annual Big: Culture & Arts Festival will be held in downtown Gainesville, Florida, April 11-13, 2025. Tickets — and discounted hotel room rates — are on sale now at bigcaf.com.
