Mayworks 2026 poster with a painted texture on canvas, featuring dock workers in construction vests linking arms, facing an incoming cargo ship.

Mayworks Festival 2026

Welcome to the 41st annual Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

The artists of this year’s festival engage with our world as it is. They bring us into the lives of workers, both local and international: a truck driver in Brampton, a health care worker in Thunder Bay, an activist in Montreal, a miner in Morocco, a sugar cane worker in the Dominican Republic, a guide in Palestine, and a contract worker in Mozambique.

Their works raise issues such as wage theft, labour misclassification, technological displacement, union busting, and incarceration as public policy. They also demonstrate how such issues are interwoven into a network of global supply chains, and how communities are organizing as agents of change.

Presented throughout the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, the diversity of works include live theatre, film, animation, installation, music, and pastry making.

Events offer both formal and informal opportunities for discussion among attendees — artists, workers, labour organizers, and community members. We invite you to join us!

In solidarity,
Mayworks Staff & Board