It’s beginning to look a lot like… SNF Nostos! The holidays may be on their way, but our sights are firmly fixed on next summer and SNF Nostos 2026, where we’ll celebrate three decades of global grantmaking. We’ve got some exciting updates to share on what’s happening from June 21 – 28 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) in Athens and at sites across Greece.
Feel the music with Release Athens x SNF Nostos. Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? David Byrne’s Who is the Sky tour comes to the SNFCC live on June 21, kicking off the weeklong celebration with Talking Heads classics and solo gems.
At the SNF Nostos Conference that opens the following day, by contrast, there won’t be a talking head in sight. From Monday through Thursday, we’re passing the podium to our incredible grantee-partners, who will draw on their deep expertise to create cross-disciplinary, engaging events from which guests can select to build their own conference experience. Then on Friday, we’ll all come together as the conference culminates in a series of SNF-led signature plenary sessions.
From Monday through Thursday, make yourself at home at the conference’s Houses. Curated with our close partners at the journalism nonprofit iMEdD, four “Houses” will form the core of the SNF Nostos Conference, exploring timely topics reflecting different threads of SNF’s—and, critically, our partners’—work. The Houses of Arts & Culture, Civics & Education, Health & Sports, and Future will offer conversations, exhibitions, and other activities featuring fresh perspectives from alumni of the SNF Dialogues, as well as the members of the SNF Nostos Youth Advisory Committee who will serve as hosts. Each House will have its own day in the limelight.
We’ve called them “Houses” because we want participants to feel welcome to engage and make the conversations their own—“Nostos” means “homecoming,” after all. Mi House of Future es su House of Future.
Peopling these Houses are organizations reflecting the amazing range of our grantee-partners, and although the SNF Nostos Conference program is still a work in progress, it is already chockful of fascinating perspectives on timely topics. A physician and an art historian will come together to see what art can illuminate about health—and vice versa. Sakhi for South Asian Survivors from New York will show how we can help advance the autonomy and wellbeing of women and girls, as will CAMFED, which works in Zambia and other countries in Africa. London’s Chatham House will take a wider view of developments across the continent, and the DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies will use data visualization to distill the ways our world is changing. Thinkers from a trio of ethics-oriented organizations—the Berman Institute of Bioethics and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University as well as the NYC-based Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs—will offer ethical insights into democratic resilience and AI. The National Library of Greece, whose home is at the SNFCC, will lead a discussion on the future of libraries, while the New York Public Library will examine their broader role in society.
They may not have all the answers, but they do have some of the right questions: What if reaching the summit is no longer the greatest challenge Mount Everest offers? The San Francisco-based American Himalayan Foundation will provide a mountaintop view. What if the seeds of change are literal seeds? New Agriculture New Generation will show what can grow from the fertile soil of agriculture-based development. How might democratizing research help prevent future pandemics? How can we tackle heartbreaking disparities in pediatric cancer outcomes? Two New York institutions, The Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will be joined by peers to discuss addressing critical health needs at scale.
Become an artist with help from the Creative Center at University Settlement in New York, an amateur physicist with guidance from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and an effective storyteller with insights from the New York-based TMI Project, then hear how neuroscience can crosspollinate with jazz through a panel and live performance curated by the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia University.
If you need to stretch your legs in the midst of these conversations, go to the hospital—to see health-sector transformation in progress. See how a hospital’s natural setting can contribute to healing, why building a hospital with mass timber makes sense, and how an old hospital can be replaced with a new one on the same site without compromising care. Attend an open house at the SNF public hospitals under construction in Thessaloniki, Komotini, and Sparta from Monday through Wednesday to see how SNF is working to make quality health care more accessible through its Global Health Initiative (GHI).
On Thursday, you’ve been summoned for jury duty. As part of the House of Future, the Tällberg Foundation will present The Trials of Atlas, a participatory performance in which everyone is invited to bring out their courtroom drama chops and help put AI on trial. That night, fans will go bananas for Gorillaz at another Release Athens x SNF Nostos concert.
On Friday, the SNF Nostos Conference kicks into an even higher gear as we all come together, as SNF highlights 30 partnerships of the past 30 years while looking ahead, diving into key ideas for humanity and what makes us human, from global geopolitics, to the values playing sports can impart, to the power of family, to the life-changing impact of AI—for better or worse. An SNF Dialogues “fishbowl” discussion—curated and moderated by Anna Kynthia Bousdoukou—and held in collaboration with Simon Fraser University sets the tone for the free-flowing, unscripted conversations that are the SNF Nostos Conference’s trademark, like an Ask Me Anything with SNF Co-President Andreas Dracopoulos, among others.
On Saturday, we’ll take a beat after the conference, then later that night dance to the beat at a celebratory DJ party.
All throughout the week, from Sunday through Sunday, extracurricular activities at the SNFCC cast light on new facets of some of the same themes the conference covers, from the arts to sports to technology and ethics. You’ll have the chance to explore Artefacts of the Future, an exhibition by ETH Zurich whose imagined relics from the future will spark discussion on ethical conundrums. The World Cup will be running concurrently with SNF Nostos, and we decided to replace the think-you’re-being-sneaky surreptitious score checking we’d all be doing on our phones with the communal experience of watching together.
At SNF Nostos, all the world’s a stage, including this semi-truck. The Greek National Opera (GNO), our close partner of well over a decade, will be presenting special GNO Ballet performances all throughout the week, including A Streetcar Named Desire; To Have Been So Close So Many Times, an original work by GNO Artistic Director Giorgos Koumentakis; and Future Cargo, a co-production between the GNO and The Place in London that will feature sci-fi dance in a futuristic 40-foot semi.
That’s not all of course—we’ve already mentioned the much-loved SNF Nostos Run on Tuesday, the Kafeneio tou Gianni digital detox café open throughout the week, and not least of all the interactive experience offering an immersive look at SNF’s grantmaking through time and space—and there’s more to come as the program expands and develops! As we are getting closer to the event, we’ll share more on speakers, bands, DJs, and other one-of-a-kind events.