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5:30 PM:
Registration. Meet-and-greet with Boston City Councilor-At-Large candidates.
6:00 - 6:20 PM:Welcoming remarks from the Boston Mayoral Forum Steering Committee
Opening performance by Regie Gibson: Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate
Jared Bowen will begin moderating candidate Q&A’s.
6:20 - 6:50 PM:Q&A with Michelle Wu
7:00 - 7:30 PM:Q&A with Josh Kraft
7:40 - 8:10 PM:Q&A with Domingos DaRosa
8:10 - 8:30 PM:Closing remarks
Boston wouldn’t be Boston without its arts community. But Boston won’t support the arts community the way we want it to unless we ask for what we need.
2025 is a municipal election year in Massachusetts and in the City of Boston, the mayor and city council are on the ballot. Create the Vote is mobilizing arts and culture leaders in Boston to organize the sector around an arts and culture policy agenda, engage with candidates who are running for elected office, and to turn out voters.
Join the 2025 Create the Vote Boston Steering and Host Committees for a Boston Mayoral Forum on Arts & Culture at the Strand Theatre on Wednesday, July 30, 2025 at 6:00 PM (doors open at 5:30 PM). This forum is your chance to hear directly from Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft, and Domingos DaRosa about their visions for the creative workforce and economy. The forum will be moderated by Jared Bowen, host of GBH’s The Culture Show. We will enjoy an opening performance by Regie Gibson, Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate.
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Executive Arts Editor and Host
Jared Bowen is the Emmy award-winning Executive Arts Editor and host of The Culture Show, a daily radio program and podcast at GBH exploring the creative process through a lively mix of local and national artist profiles, performances and exhibitions.
Jared is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and appears regularly on GBH 89.7, where he covers the latest happenings in the region’s theater, art, music, dance and film scenes on GBH’s Morning Edition and Boston Public Radio.
He is also the moderator of the Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall, facilitating conversations with everyone from world leaders to Oscar-winning actors. He is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association and is a Trustee of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.He has won four New England Emmy Awards and two Edward R. Murrow Awards for his arts reporting and is a recipient of the Commonwealth Award, recognizing achievement in the arts, humanities and sciences. He began his career at Dateline NBC in New York, is a graduate of Emerson College and holds an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
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Literary performer, playwright and educator, Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the US, Cuba, and Europe. In Italy, representing the US, Regie received both the Absolute Poetry Award (Monfalcone) and the Europa en Versi Award (LaGuardia di Como). Regie has received the Walker Scholarship, multiple Mass Cultural Council Awards, a YMCA Writer’s Fellowship, the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) grants for the production of his first musical, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae.-- in which he fuses the Euripides’ tragedy with African American music and spirituality. Regie has performed with, and composed texts for, the Boston City Singers, the Mystic Chorale, and wrote the choral drama for Handel+Haydn's "Crossing The Deep". Regie has served as creative lead on a team of scientists and members of the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Center (Hague, Netherlands), helping to craft language regarding issues of climate change. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester and is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music. Regie Gibson is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Massachusetts and sees that his primary responsibility as the first is to do his best to make sure there will be a second and a third.
ASL and CART services will be available.
We are not taking live questions from the audience during the forum. Only questions that were submitted in advance via the online registration form will be considered.
Online registration is now closed. You can still attend the forum by registering in person at the Strand Theatre between 5:30 - 6:00 PM on July 30th.
For questions about Create the Vote and our Boston coalition, please contact createthevote@mass-creative.org.
The Boston Mayoral Forum is organized by host committee members: Abilities Dance, AfroDesiaCity Productions LLC, ArtsBoston, #ARTSTAYSHERE Coalition, BAMS Fest Inc, Boston Art Review, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston Children's Museum, Boston Lyric Opera, Castle of our Skins, Charlestown Rehearsal Studios Tenants Association, Company One Theatre, Dorchester Art Project, EdVestors, Embrace Boston, Expressive Art Studios, GrubStreet, Humphreys Street Studios, MASSCreative, National Center of Afro-American Artists, Photosbymarcia LLC, Roxbury Cultural District, SpeakEasy Stage, Temple Gill, The Annette McCarty Art Studio, The Fenway Alliance, The Network for Arts Administrators of Color (NAACBoston), The Record Co., and Veronica Robles Cultural Center (VROCC).