Cheers to the new year—the hip way. Attendees can sip three featured drinks, discuss cocktail trends, and make bold predictions. Low and no-proof refreshments, wild garnishes, and unexpected base spirits just may define the year’s cocktail palate. 

School is in session at the family-owned brewing company, so take a seat and sip your way through a course of over thirty beers and ciders. Live music from The Panda Conspiracy and Space Whales pairs well with the winter spiced cider or McMenamins Thompson Brewery’s Whiskey Jane Sour. 

Calling football fans and diehard foodies: This is how you elevate the Super Bowl party. Lumen Field is transformed into an epic dining room, and Seattle’s most MVP-worthy chefs (Musang’s Melissa Miranda, Stuart Lane of Spinasse, David Nichols from Eight Row to name a few) dish out four-course meals between the goalposts. 

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Celebrating its return to Seattle after two pandemic years, Teatro ZinZanni offers a new variety show all about coming home. Attendees enjoy a four-course meal while the show goes on, featuring aerialists, a yodeling dominatrix, trapeze artists, musicians, and a basketball freestyle juggler.

Stroll through Belltown on a choose-your-own-adventure evening of local artists. Seattle Glassblowing Studio boasts demonstrations, Radiant Neon showcases brightly lit installations, and Armistice Coffee hosts a live painting. 

Opening in conjunction with the February iteration of the Georgetown Art Attack, Kathy Paul’s restorative work takes center stage at the Seattle Artist League. Back-to-back strokes left Paul without most of her vision, and her drawings and paintings are part exploration, part therapy in an attempt to rehabilitate her optic nerves and learn to see again.

MOHAI plays host to a nationally touring exhibition of instrumental Black architects and designers who created the world we inhabit—from the pyramids of Egypt to local skylines. A portion of the exhibit features Black designers who specifically impacted Seattle’s structures, both historical and contemporary. 

No screaming sensors and “do not touch” signs here. The soft sculpture and textile artwork in Soft Touch are designed to be tactile: shake a velvet hand, recline on shag carpet under a ceiling of clouds, or engage with bygone playfulness and imagination in Seattle drag queen Sugar Darling’s larger-than-life breakfast nook. 

In celebration of Seattle Pro Musica’s golden anniversary, the choral group commissioned five young composers to create and perform new works. In the fourth installment, composer Saunder Choi presents a musical exploration of America’s gun violence plague, preceded by a pre-concert panel discussion with artistic director and conductor Karen P. Thomas.

With a soulful edge and punk attitude—inherited from her grandmother, founding member of founding all-girl punk band The Slits—Tianna Esperanza’s often tongue-in-cheek lyrics authentically address heartbreak and tragedy while showcasing her vocal versatility.

Forgotten and unsung artists get their moment in the limelight thanks to a playwright duo’s journey through the rich legacy of Black stage production. History of Theatre follows artistic expression from enslavement to the boundary-breaking actors Ira Aldridge and Rose McClendon; to Pat Chappelle’s first all-Black touring vaudeville troupe and Seattle’s own Negro Repertory Company.

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As seen on Just for Laughs, The Tonight Show, and your funny friend’s Reels feed, Australian-born standup comedian Simon Taylor brings his take on travel mishaps and life as a millennial. 

A quartet of actors brings Ovid’s 2,000-year-old poems to life in a play never before seen outside of the United Kingdom—where audiences raved about the fresh take on myths both well-known and rarely told. 

Based on Agatha Christie’s mind-bending crime novel and teeming with classic whodunnit fun, the play follows detective Hercule Poirot’s quest to solve a pair of mysterious murders in the quiet, unsuspecting English village of King’s Abbot.

Over 100 animated, live-action, and documentary films for kids and the young-at-heart air during the annual festival. But it’s not all fairy tales: The festival screens films in Spanish and French, youth-produced films, and blocks with LGBTQIA+ and Black protagonists. There are also workshops for filmmaking teens. 

In its 15th annual iteration, the festival returns with 18 crime dramas, most in 35mm, from Hollywood’s mid-twentieth century noir period. Star power shines bright with Eddie Muller as host and local noir authors Vince and Rosemarie Keenan on hand. 

A female-focused lineup of contemporary documentaries, short films, and panel discussions with Sámi filmmakers comprises the fifth annual festival in Ballard. While the event has always screened works directed by indigenous people of the northern slice of the Scandinavian Peninsula and large parts of the Kola Peninsula, this marks the first year the films themselves were not only created, but also curated by a Sámi filmmaker.

The recent audience choice award-winner at Tacoma’s Film Festival centers the 19th century all-Black regiment of the United States Army. Known as the Buffalo Soldiers, the group tirelessly fought battles abroad—for a country that didn’t accept them amidst ongoing civil rights battles at home. Local director Dru Holley will stick around for audience questions and a community discussion after the screening.

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Dating app veterans, meet the perfect love-gone-wrong evening. A collection of monologues and short comedy sketches bring enough hilarious nightmare fuel to make you swear off dating for another year. 

An afternoon of cultural celebration awaits with world-renowned rubab player Homayoun Sakhi, a documentary screening, the exhibition of artwork rescued by artist-activist group ArtLords, and the unveiling of an embroidery project created by local Afghan women. 

All the holiday classics—baked goods, flowers, vintage threads, a mimosa bar—in one aesthetic Ballard spot. And what better way to cement love, even self love, than with permanent jewelry?

Manifest springtime among dozens of display gardens, landscaping vendors, and horticulture demonstrations in the annual expo. 

A traveling exhibit, produced by the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, invites viewers into Seattle’s Higo 10 Cents Store, a Japantown social hub and catch-all store owned by the Murakami family from 1907 to 2003. Personal photos, journals, and artifacts bring audiences through points of fraught and joyous history. 

Poet, public defender, and criminal justice reform activist Reginald Dwayne Betts transforms his latest collection of poetry, Felon, into a one-man performance piece. His work interrogates and challenges our notions of justice from within, drawing on his experiences as an incarcerated teenager and later, as a young man attempting to enter society with an unforgiving record. 

Calling all true crime devotees. Once just an unassuming retired patent attorney researching her family history, Barbara Rae-Venter recounts how she came to solve some of the country’s most chilling cold cases (including California’s Golden State Killer), armed just with a laptop and a knack for investigative genetic genealogy. 

One for the astronomy buffs: Graduate students and faculty present on recent otherworldly findings, and scientists stick around for brews and questions. This month’s installment brings a presentation on our place in the Milky Way and how Earth’s early lifeforms teach experts about life on other planets. Pay attention, since post-talk trivia prizes are at stake.