Dweller festival to return in 2026 after yearlong hiatus, expanding its citywide celebration of Black electronic music

New York’s Dweller festival, a multi-venue celebration of Black electronic and experimental music, will return in February 2026 after a self-imposed yearlong break that organizers say was necessary to protect the small team behind it and the ethos that has made it stand out in the city’s crowded nightlife calendar.

Dates and venues

The sixth edition of the festival is scheduled for Feb. 17–22, 2026, with an additional closing event on Feb. 27. Events will take place across clubs and arts spaces including Nowadays, Bossa Nova Civic Club, Paragon, Public Records, Pioneer Works, Basement and Signal, as well as a do-it-yourself venue for the final night.

Dweller’s comeback follows a pause in 2025—the first time since its founding in 2019 that the festival did not stage an edition. The organizers described that break as a “solar revolution hiatus,” saying they needed time to confront financial strain, burnout and the pressures of running a politically ambitious project with a core team of just three people.

“We are three people working at the margins,” the organizers said in their 2024 hiatus announcement.

They cited “financial, institutional and mental challenges” and said the pause was intended to ensure “sustainability and longevity” and to protect what they called “the sanctity of the festival.”

A festival built to center Black electronic music

Launched at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club by organizer and Discwoman co-founder Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, Dweller has grown from a week of parties at a single venue into a citywide event that pairs club nights with talks, screenings and editorial work. The festival describes itself as “a festival celebrating Black electronic artists” and operates with a near-exclusively Black lineup in genres where Black origins are often obscured.

On its website, Dweller says it seeks to “center Black perspectives” in club and experimental music and to challenge a landscape where Black artists are frequently treated as exceptions. In promotional materials for a previous collaboration, the project called itself “a black lighthouse; a siren in the storm for those who know the isolating whitewaters of electronic music all too well.”

2026 lineup: spanning styles and geographies

The 2026 program continues that mission while stretching across styles and geographies. Announced performers include Junglepussy; vocalist and producer keiyaA; artist, writer and DJ Juliana Huxtable; Harlem ballroom legend Kevin Aviance; UK acid house and jungle pioneer A Guy Called Gerald; Lisbon batida figure DJ Marfox; high-velocity UK DJ Sherelle; dubstep mainstay Mala; and Tanzanian singeli producer DJ Travella, among dozens of others.

One night at Queens club Nowadays will be dedicated to dubstep, hosted by Los Angeles-based DJ Introspekt and Baltimore’s Joe Nice, an early advocate of the genre in the United States. Another program at the same venue is billed as a 24-hour party, featuring Mala, DJ Travella and UK DJ Mia Koden, linking early dubstep with East African and contemporary bass sounds.

Other events emphasize the festival’s ties to local queer and trans nightlife. A Feb. 19 collaboration with New York party Body Hack will highlight queer, nonbinary and trans artists, with a bill that includes keiyaA, Brazilian performer Slim Soledad and others. The Feb. 27 closing event, co-presented with queer techno collective Merge at a DIY space, is set to host Dutch techno veteran STERAC alongside Shyboi, Akua back-to-back with 1morning, Juana and Saint Panic.

Detroit, Chicago and other historic centers of Black dance music are also represented in the 2026 lineup. Detroit techno DJ Bone and Mutagenix—the duo of Huey Mnemonic and D. Strange—are scheduled to play at Basement, a Queens club known for its subterranean techno nights. Detroit’s Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale, often referred to as the “Godmother of House,” appears elsewhere on the bill.

Context: a pause meant to prevent burnout

Dweller’s return comes two years after its last edition, held in February 2024 across venues such as Nowadays, Bossa Nova Civic Club, Paragon and Café Erzulie. That festival hosted more than 80 acts and included a film program in partnership with the Criterion Channel that examined the Black roots of electronic music, including a screening of the Afrofuturist documentary “The Last Angel of History.”

The decision to pause in 2025 and return with a new structure sets Dweller apart in an environment where festivals often expand until financial or logistical problems force abrupt cancellations. In its hiatus statement, the team said working with the level of care they aimed for was “difficult to maintain within current economic and institutional conditions” and that they needed time to “process, align and build systems” that would allow the project to endure.

Rather than shifting toward a heavily sponsored model, the 2026 edition continues to lean on a network of independent clubs, arts organizations and DIY spaces. The festival’s own site presents its program through a speculative, sci-fi-style framework, describing an “aural turbidity zone” and a sequence of phases that read like a storm advisory—language that nods to Afrofuturist traditions and to the Detroit electro duo Drexciya, whose underwater Black mythology has influenced the festival’s name and aesthetic.

Beyond bookings: a publishing and research platform

Behind the music programming, Dweller also operates as a publishing and research platform. Editor and co-organizer Ryan Clarke oversees a blog that has featured long-form criticism, historical essays and interviews on under-documented corners of Black electronic music, as well as the “Living Equipment” discussion and listening series on “minor histories and radical resonances of Black electronic music.”

The focus on education reflects a broader context in which techno, house, footwork, dubstep and related genres—many developed by Black and often queer communities in cities such as Detroit and Chicago—have become global industries frequently marketed with overwhelmingly white lineups. Dweller’s organizers have said that part of their work is to make those origins visible to new audiences while offering Black artists more than token spots on bills.

The choice of venues underscores that tension. Many of the spaces Dweller will use in 2026 sit in neighborhoods that have undergone waves of gentrification, including Bushwick, Ridgewood and Red Hook. Holding a festival that centers Black artists in those clubs can function as a kind of cultural reclamation, even as the organizers acknowledge they operate within the same urban economies that have displaced many longtime Black residents.

What Dweller’s return signals

As the February 2026 edition approaches, Dweller is positioning its return not as a reset to business as usual but as a test of whether small, values-driven festivals can withstand mounting pressures in nightlife and the arts. In announcing the hiatus, the team said they would come back in order to “contextualise an enduring range of Black thoughts, conceptions and expressions of tomorrow.”

By February, that aspiration will take concrete form on dance floors across the city: in a marathon at Nowadays where dubstep meets singeli, in a basement where Detroit techno shares space with New York ballroom, and in a DIY room where queer collectives close out the week. For a festival that chose to go dark rather than burn out, the signal it sends in 2026 will be measured as much in how it operates as in who steps up to the decks.