By Jessica Herndon
Before the lights dim and the first premieres begin, we’re taking you inside the places that will define the Sundance Film Festival experience in Boulder. From the historic Boulder Theater to Macky Auditorium and the Dairy Arts Center, this series offers a look at the venues where unforgettable Festival moments will unfold.
Months before the Sundance Film Festival officially makes Boulder, Colorado, its home, a bit of our legacy can already be found inside the Dairy Arts Center.
Look at the films cycling through the Boedecker Theater, the multidisciplinary arts center’s intimate cinema, and chances are you’ll recognize a few titles with Sundance Film Festival connections. Among them is 2025’s Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), which won the NEXT Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast, and 2026 Fest premiere Leviticus. Before we announced the Festival’s move to Boulder, the Dairy was regularly championing the kind of independent films and emerging voices that have long found a home at the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute.
Films rotate weekly, documentaries make up roughly 40% of its regular programming, and stories from more than 85 countries have appeared on Boedecker’s screen. For Melissa Fathman, executive director of the Dairy Arts Center, the overlap isn’t exactly a coincidence.
“Everyone recognizes Sundance as being about discovery,” she says, pointing to the emerging filmmakers and underrepresented voices the Dairy has similarly made a priority. Since news of the Festival’s arrival, she’s already noticed increased interest in the center’s cinema programming. “It’s raising awareness to a larger community that we’re here,” she says. “We just want to keep growing. We want to ride the wave with you guys and [keep] that momentum and interest going all year round.”
Beginning with the 2027 Sundance Film Festival, the connection will become even stronger. The Dairy will serve as a screening venue and the primary home for the return of New Frontier, the Festival program dedicated to artists experimenting at the intersection of film, art, and technology. To understand why the Dairy and New Frontier make such a natural pairing, it helps to know how the place came to be.
Before it was filled with movies, dance, theater, and visual art, the building was literally a dairy. After the former milk-processing facility was abandoned in the 1980s, a group of local artists began imagining what else it could become. Among them was an experimental filmmaker, and the original vision focused on a community where artists could live, create, perform, and show their work under one roof.
Today, as many as 150 organizations use spaces at the Dairy Arts Center each year, regularly filling the building with a mix of film, visual art, dance, music, and theater. One local theater leader even dubbed the Dairy “Boulder’s Grand Central Station for the arts,” Fathman says. At the venue, artists and audiences cross paths in the lobby, trade notes about what they’ve seen, and might even be inspired to create something in real time.
Last summer, Turkish American artist Belgin Yücelen’s exhibition Matter Over Mind: Art, Science, and Materials Reimagined filled the Dairy with work exploring the relationship between art, science, and the materials that surround us. After encountering Yücelen’s work, dancer and choreographer Celia Perarnaud of Oracle Performance Ensemble was inspired to create a new dance piece in response to the work.
For Fathman, moments like that capture the essence of the Dairy: Here, artists work alongside one another and can influence what someone else creates next. That sensibility feels in line with New Frontier, where experimentation, creative interaction, and the mix of disciplines are part of the point. “We certainly are always promoting experimental things, ideas, emerging artists,” Fathman says.
That philosophy extends throughout the Dairy’s film programming. Audiences can take How to Watch a Movie, an interactive series that examines cinematography, editing, acting, and directing — not to teach people how to make films, but to deepen their experience of them.
Cinema Club, which was launched by the venue’s development manager, Shay Westcott, invites members to stick around after a monthly screening for a group discussion about what they’ve watched. “It’s really about reminding people that we all bring our different perspectives and expertise to the table,” says Westcott. She recalls entering one Cinema Club discussion feeling as though she hadn’t gotten much beyond the surface of a movie. Hearing another audience member interpret the ending differently changed how she understood the film. It’s the kind of exchange familiar to Sundance Film Festival audiences, where hearing filmmakers discuss their work after a screening can deepen the experience.
The Dairy seems designed to encourage that kind of artistic curiosity. Fathman, a former opera singer, thinks deeply about how artists and audiences experience a space. “I want everything to be aesthetically beautiful and inspiring,” she says. Art lines the lobby, and the building’s sloping façade carries a theatrical origin story. Fathman says the facility’s architect, Stephen Sparn, once told her its shape was inspired by the curve of a ballerina’s arm.
Soon, Festgoers will add their own energy to the mix. Fathman wants them to immediately sense the community that created and continues to sustain the Dairy. And when the Festival ends? Fathman hopes audiences keep coming back to discover another independent film, wander through an exhibition, and build connections. She also hopes the Festival will help “solidify the Dairy as a year-round home for the best of independent cinema.”
