PRESS RELEASE

COMMON SENSES FESTIVAL, A GROUNDBREAKING FESTIVAL AIMED AT DISABILITY ACCEPTANCE, TO FILL OMAHA, NEBRASKA, WITH PERFORMANCES, ART, DISCUSSIONS, AND COALITION-BUILDING OPPORTUNITIES, IN MAY 2025

Festival Centerpiece Is the World Premiere of Sensorium Ex, Composed by Paola Prestini with a Libretto by Brenda Shaughnessy, Directed by Jerron Herman & Jay Scheib; and the AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) App, Sensorium AI, Developed by VisionIntoArt and Luke DuBois at the NYU Ability Project

As Common Senses Expands from its Autism-Focused 2022 Beginnings Into a Disability-Wide Festival, It Honors Its Roots with Preferred Interests Programming Geared Specifically Toward Attendees on the Spectrum, This Year Partnering with Office Buildings Around the City to Offer a Scavenger Hunt Through Downtown Omaha’s Elevators

Tickets Go on Sale March 8

Common Senses Festival (Founder and Director, Kate Noble Weitz) returns in 2025, filling Omaha with multi-sensory programming that explores and celebrates the uniqueness and commonalities of all of humanity with a focus on arts, science and disability acceptance. This year’s program reveals a major expansion of vision, paralleling the festival’s growth into its own nonprofit, since its autism-focused inaugural edition (under the umbrella of Autism Action Partnership), in 2022. Now a disability-wide festival, Common Senses 2025 surrounds the theme of “Voice,” approached across genres and activities, and features the world premiere of an innovative opera from composer Paola Prestini and poet Brenda Shaughnessy, multifaceted explorations of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), sensory theater, poetry workshops, readings, and more. Tickets go on sale on March 8 at commonsensesfestival.com.

Common Senses Festival was founded by Kate Noble Weitz, a former opera administrator from a family of musicians whose son, at three years old, was diagnosed with autism. Weitz, her husband, and son were abruptly met with the vast challenges of inaccessibility and insufficient services throughout Omaha and Nebraska. Weitz sought to educate herself to approach the diagnosis, and to advocate for change in Omaha, from a place as thoroughly informed by research and strengths-based practices as by experience: she’s a LEND graduate from Stony Brook University, where she also earned a microcredential called Introduction to the Science and Lived Experience of Autism (ISLEA). She is currently working to complete training to become a certified ADA Coordinator. Weitz started the festival, applying her steadfast belief in art’s ability to catalyze change to shifting discourse and offering countless otherwise unavailable and unprecedented experiences that would resonate on both a local and national level. The first festival reached visitors from 255 zip codes and 26 states.

Weitz explains, “With the festival, I wanted to make Omaha a better, more accessible, place for my son and his peers. But this is about everyone: people are so much closer to disability than they’re willing to talk about; if you’re lucky to live long enough, your ability to walk may change, your ability to remember may change. I am not a clinician or a scientist, but I know how to curate and put together experiences and bring people together. I’ve always felt that arts are where major cultural shifts start, and so the arts have to be how we change our conversation around disability.”

Speaking to this goal of simulating citywide change, as the festival expands its horizons, it’s forming a vital initiative uniting Omaha’s disability-focused organizations: The Common Coalition. This coalition serves as a collaborative and supportive space for organizations, regardless of the disabilities they focus on, to discuss shared challenges and work toward collective solutions through non-competitive and constructive conversations.

There are four tracks in the 2025 festival: Performing Arts, Science & Technology, Preferred Interests, and Film & Discourse. (See below for details on each; full programming is available on Common Senses’ website.) Though Common Senses 2025 extends outward from the original festival to speak more comprehensively to various experiences of disability, the festival continues to honor its very personal roots, with the program “Preferred Interests” providing space for enjoyment and exploration of neurodiverse individuals’ hobbies—this year featuring a Downtown Omaha-traversing scavenger hunt through the city’s tallest building’s elevators. As the festival continues to evolve in coming years—with planned themes of “Move” and “Play”—“Preferred Interests” will remain an integral part.

Adds Weitz, “ I spend a lot of time in elevators—like, a lot of time in elevators. My son gets feedback from the experience, but it’s not only about vestibular feedback. He watches people that have YouTube channels on elevators, too. Some might try to hide or dissuade these ‘preferred interests’ because they may seem odd — but you know what? Lean into what your kid wants. I want to give permission to other families to do the same damn thing. If your kid loves elevators and wants to ride them, then you're gonna get an awesome scavenger hunt. It speaks to the larger strengths-based approach of the festival: don’t try to program out what makes your child unique.”

Performing Arts

With Common Senses’ 2025 headliner, Sensorium Ex (May 22-25 at University of Nebraska at Omaha - Sapp Fieldhouse), the festival offers an expansive, multi-modal opera that asks the questions at the heart of this year’s festival: what it means to have a voice, and what is the nature of a voice beyond language. Sensorium Ex, a world premiere opera by composer and National Sawdust co-founder and Artistic Director Paola Prestini (Silent Light, Primero Sueño), with a libretto by poet Brenda Shaughnessy (Our Andromeda, So Much Synth), commissioned by Common Senses and VisionIntoArt, directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib, and co-produced by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects, rethinks how opera shapes narratives of disability, how opera is engaged by its audience, and how the industry can support disabled artists.

The opera tells a dystopian tale centered on a scientist/mother and her nonverbal, nonambulatory child with multiple disabilities, as they resist a villainous corporate entity's attempts to harvest their human data in order to create an AI that will eventually replace people. Predominantly featuring disabled performers, and supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, and National Sawdust, the project is devising new artistic practices which center disability equity and access at all steps in the process: this framework, Sensorium Codex, will be made available to all performing arts institutions. Sensorium Ex also incorporates Sensorium AI (see more info below in the “Science & Technology” track), a new AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication App.

Scribble, a work of sensory theatre for young audiences that first debuted at Lincoln Center’s Big Umbrella Festival, produced in partnership with Omaha’s Rose Theatre, is a dynamic production described by the performers as an “intergalactic dance party.” Multiple performances of Scribble will be held over two days at Omaha’s science museum, Kiewit Luminarium (May 16-17) followed by two days of performances at the Rose Theatre (May 20-21).

Meanwhile, for adults, Common Senses 2025 likewise creates equitable space for sensory experiences with Risky Disco, a built environment where all are able to experience their authentic selves in ways at once extraordinary and ordinary. Risky Disco is created in collaboration with BlueBarn Theatre and the Omaha Community Playhouse, and will be open May 23 on the University of Nebraska Omaha campus.

With Voices Untethered, created in collaboration between Common Senses and the Nebraska Writers Collective, from now through March, esteemed national disability advocate and poet Dr. Lateef McLeod is leading online workshops mentoring local disabled poets, helping them develop new work relating to the theme of “Voice.” On May 13, these workshops will culminate in a visit by McLeod, who will perform in a poetry reading together with the local poets in an event for festival attendees at The Benson Theatre.

Science & Technology

Blurring the lines between art and technology, Sensorium AI, developed by VisionIntoArt and Luke DuBois at the NYU Ability Project, expands the possibilities for voice and expression for people with disordered, impaired, or limited speech. It will be free and available to anyone who wishes to download and customize it.

To complement Sensorium AI, Common Senses is collaborating with the Munroe-Meyer Institute and the Kiewit Luminarium to host a hands-on retrospective exhibition of AAC devices, with historical devices alongside current technology that museum goers will be able to try for themselves. The exhibition opens May 10.

Weitz says of the retrospective, “Attendees will be able to try many of the devices at the Luminarium, some of which are very hard to use. I think it’ll change the ballgame, in offering hands-on engagement that creates a type of empathy you don’t get from just watching or reading about something.”

Preferred Interests

The inaugural subject of the Preferred Interest track will be elevators, with the downtown-wide event Going Up: The Elevator Experience, May 10th. For Going Up, Common Senses has enlisted some of Omaha’s most prominent companies to host an elevator scavenger hunt. Elevator enthusiasts will receive a passport to be stamped, and each stop will have extra entertainment to accompany the elevator ride. Locations include First National Bank, Union Pacific, Burlington Capital, the Durham Museum, KETV, the Scottish Rite and the Dock at Millwork Commons. As a benefit of their participation in hosting the scavenger hunt, Common Senses has offered the employees of these companies complimentary training and learning opportunities from Common Senses staff to augment their own internal DEIA training.

Film & Discourse

The festival offers two days of engaging and exploratory discourse in Common Conversations, at UNO’s Community Engagement Center. On May 20, Associate Professor of Inclusive Education at Rowan University Dr. Brent Elder, author and Professor of Occupational Therapy at NYU Dr. Kristie Patten, and [TKTK] will gather for Inclusivity Reimagined: Strength-Based Strategies and Disability Acceptance. The following day, May 21, a conversation around Building Accessibility in the Arts will bring together artists featured in this year’s festival—as well as those whose work is paving the way for its future. Participants will include Sensorium Ex composer Paola Prestini and producer Ras Dia; choreographer and director Susan Marshall, scenic designer Mimi Lien, and Director, Media Arts and Culture, Temple University Institute on Disabilities Lisa Sonneborn, all collaborators on Rhythm Bath, the headliner of next year’s festival; Frozen Light Theatre (UK) Co-Artistic Directors Lucy Garland and Amber Onat Gregory; and, from Risky Disco, Carrie Nath and Katy Kepler.

On May 15th, the festival will screen Paul Lieber’s The Making of Sensorium Ex at Film Streams. A panel discussion with Paola Prestini, Brenda Shaughnessy, and the opera’s creative team will follow.

Over the course of April and May the festival will host screenings of the Emmy-winning documentary My Disability Roadmap, co-directed by Samuel Habib and his father, Dan Habib—featured as a New York Times OpDoc in 2022— on the campus of University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Funding Credits

The Common Senses Festival is made possible by generous support from The Holland Foundation, The Daugherty Foundation, The Weitz Family Foundation, The Pape Family Foundation, Cindy and Mogens Bay, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Annette and Paul Smith, Sarah and Adam Yale, and FNBO.

About Common Senses Festival

Common Senses Festival was launched in 2022 in Omaha, Nebraska, as a first-of-its-kind exploration and celebration of intersections between science, art, and disability awareness. It is the creation of Founder and Director Kate Noble Weitz, who joined her extensive background in arts administration with her lived experience as the mother of a child profoundly impacted by autism. Weitz conceived the Common Senses Festival as a community gathering for unique and inclusive arts experiences as well as a platform to showcase tangible new advances in scientific research that aspires to improve the lives of individuals with disabilities and their caregivers. An essential component of Common Senses Festival is discourse, wrapping the festival’s offerings in panel discussions, talks, and community conversations with the scientists, engineers, artists, and advocates behind the festival’s installations and performances. The next Common Senses Festival is scheduled to take place in Omaha in May 2025 with “Voice” as a central theme. It will feature the world premiere of Sensorium Ex: an unprecedented new opera by composer Paola Prestini and poet Brenda Shaughnessy that incorporates next-generation, AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) software. Common Senses Festival will dive deeper into contemplations of “Voice” with the help of award-winning poets and filmmakers convening in Omaha to perform, screen, and discuss their work. As always, festivalgoers can expect to participate in rich discourse with fascinating national experts throughout the month on topics ranging from strength-based interventions to accessibility in the arts. Through these offerings and more, Common Senses Festival helps us discover what makes humans unique and what we all have in common.

Press Contact: Blake Zidell of Blake Zidell & Associates, at blake@blakezidell.com, 917-572-2493.