The National Cultural Foundation
West Terrace,
St. James, Barbados
246-417-6610
Stepping onto the NIFCA stage this year, the Wesley Hall Junior School dancers carried far more than choreography. They carried a lesson, a legacy and the weight of a story older than any of them. Their piece, The Fight for Freedom, captured the imagination of audiences and judges, earning NIFCA ...
Before Lystra, the young girl at the heart of “Ballast”, stepped onto the page, she lived in a twelve-year-old Roseann Pile who once watched the Barbados Landship and longed to dance with them. This year, that childhood longing found its way into NIFCA, earning Roseann one of the most celebrated ...
When Evan McDonald began listening closely to his grandmother’s childhood memories, he didn’t realise he was gathering the first threads of what would become his artistic identity. Her stories—staking out sheep, fetching water from the standpipe, walking the roads of Christ Church with her mother and cousins—became an informal archive. ...
Every flavour Juan Wilson presented at NIFCA 2025 carried a piece of her past. Through Harold & Holman, she turned her family’s traditions into award-winning creations. Operating under her business umbrella, Uniquely Crafted, Juan’s work is grounded in the legacies of her father and grandfather. This year, that legacy translated into an ...
When ZEITGEIST! earned two NIFCA Silver Awards in 2025 for Season 2 Episodes 1 and 3, it marked not just another accolade but a moment of clarity for creator and producer Kota Forde-Cumberbatch. For someone who describes herself as perpetually uncertain about the quality of her own work until months after completion, ...
When Ramario Phillips thinks back to the moment writing truly entered his life, he returns to 2011: a junior bronze at NIFCA for a poem he never expected to travel so far. He had written Every Time I Climb a Tree for an inter-school competition, but his teacher, Sherryl Griffith, submitted it to NIFCA ...
When Samantha Julien stepped onto the NIFCA stage to share her spoken word piece 1260, she carried with her far more than a poem. She carried the collective exhaustion, pride, frustration, and deep, unshakable calling of hundreds of Barbadian teachers whose daily realities often go unseen. A Spanish teacher at Parkinson Memorial School ...
When Jennifer Walker first stepped into the world of creatives, it did not begin under bright stage lights but rather in the quiet corners of curiosity. As a child, she was captivated by performing arts and the stories of the world unfolding on television screens and it was that early ...
At 38, when many settle into routine, Nakita Thomas was quietly wrestling with a feeling she could no longer ignore. “I had reached a point where I felt like I was merely existing and surviving and I wanted more,” she said. Animated, expressive and long drawn to music, poetry and performance, she found herself stuck — until her ...