Animas seniors launch Under One Moon Arts Festival for youth arts access

Four Animas High School seniors have turned a capstone project into a public arts festival with real money, real programming and a real venue attached. Sophie May, Avery Colclough, Anya McMillen and Penny Mark spent the last six months organizing the Under One Moon Arts Festival, a two-day event set for April 25 and 26 at Tico Time River Resort in Aztec.

The festival is built around live music, dance, visual art, guided workshops, food trucks and vendor booths, but the larger shift is operational. The students are not staging a school performance night. They built the event through a nonprofit effort called Peaks and Valleys Arts Partnership, which required them to secure a venue, line up artists and vendors, and create a structure for where the proceeds will go.

That financial piece gives the festival a civic purpose that reaches beyond the stage. According to the plan the students built, 100% of the weekend’s proceeds will be divided between Durango Friends of the Arts and the Genesis Inspiration Foundation. The arrangement ties the festival directly to youth arts access, making the event a fundraiser as well as a showcase for young performers and makers.

For Animas and the wider Hidalgo County community, the project also points to what student leadership can produce when it is given room to operate like a real public venture. The students said the festival is meant to build bridges across ages, art forms and communities, and that goal now has a concrete test: whether a youth-led arts event can draw visitors, spotlight local talent and return measurable value to the institutions it supports. In a small community where young people often leave to find bigger stages, four seniors used their final year to build one of their own.