12 Jul 46th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival: “Rewild” in 2026!
The 46th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, North America’s oldest wild mushroom event, returns this summer with a bold invitation to mycophiles, myconauts, and the mycocurious everywhere: “Rewild.” Each August, Telluride becomes the epicenter of fungal culture, science, cuisine, and community – and 2026 promises to be one of the most dynamic years yet.
Purchase VIP & GA passes here.
Go here for more on the history of the Telluride Mushroom Festival. (Scroll back to 2009.)
A Festival for Every Kind of Fungal Enthusiast:
The Telluride Mushroom Festival is internationally renowned for its expansive programming, offering something for every age, background, and level of expertise.
Attendees can expect:
• Forays & Identification: Daily guided forays with regional and national experts, plus hands-on mushroom identification in the iconic tents at Elks Park.
• Workshops & Demonstrations: From cultivation to microscopy to fermentation, participants can learn practical skills from leaders in the field.
• Lectures & Panels: Cutting-edge science, conservation, ethnomycology, and cultural programming.
• Culinary Events: Tastings, chef demos, and opportunities to explore the flavors of wild and cultivated fungi.
• The Mushroom Parade: The beloved, delightfully eccentric procession that transforms downtown Telluride into a mycelial carnival.
• Live Music: Nightly live music ranging from bluegrass, electronic, traditional eastern music fusion,indie psychedelic pop/rock, jazz, and more from artists including Mah Ze Tar, Scott Nice, Banshee Tree, Copper Children, Quattlebuam, Thom LaFond, Dros Music, and DJ Jonko.
Whether you’re learning to identify chanterelles, exploring fungal ecology, engaging with mushrooms through the lens of art, culture, or are dreaming of launching a mushroom-centered business, the Festival’s experts can guide you deeper.
2026 Theme: “Rewild”:
According to Festival Program Director Britt Bunyard, Editor-in-Chief of Fungi magazine, this year’s theme, “Rewild,” reflects a global movement reshaping conservation.
Rewilding restores the ecological processes that allow landscapes to function with greater autonomy and resilience. Rather than focusing on individual species, it restores the relationships that sustain healthy ecosystems: predation, grazing, disturbance, succession, and migration. Rooted in Indigenous stewardship and embraced around the world, rewilding offers a hopeful vision for ecological restoration, with fungi serving as essential partners in reconnecting the living world.
For Telluride Mushroom Festival, however, rewilding extends beyond ecology. Marketing and Communications Manager Mariah Grimes explains: “At a time when much of our lives are centered on screens, algorithms, and an endless stream of information, many people are longing to reconnect with what is tangible, authentic, and deeply human.”
The 2026 Festival invites attendees to explore rewilding not only as an environmental movement, but also as a cultural phenom. Telluride Mushroom Festival is an immersive multi-sensory experience where attendees can get their hands dirty on forays; have meaningful conversations with strangers; share meals with new friends; drink myco-beers; learn to make paper with mushrooms; grow mushrooms; preserve wild foods, and at the end of it all, make their debut as mushroom people in the Mushroom Parade!
Together, participants will explore what it means to reconnect with the natural world, with one another and with the endearing goodness and joys of being human.
Featured Speakers & Keynotes
Mark Plotkin, Ph.D. — Ethnobotanist & Rainforest Advocate
A legendary figure in ethnobotany, Mark has worked in and on the Amazon for more than four decades.
A former student of Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard, Plotkin is the author of “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice”; “Medicine Quest”; “The Killers Within” (with Michael Shnayerson); and the children’s book, “The Shaman’s Apprentice.”
Plotkin also hosts the acclaimed podcast “Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation.”
Gabrielle Cerberville — “Chaotic Forager”
Known to millions online as the “Chaotic Forager” or the Internet’s “Mushroom Auntie,” Cerberville is a foraging educator, community mycologist, and climate advocate based in Charlottesville. Her high-energy, humorous educational content has earned nearly two million followers. A PhD student at the University of Virginia, she researches the intersection of art, science, and environmental communication. Her debut book, “Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life,” was released by Harper Collins in 2025.
Maria Pinto — Author of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless
Writer, researcher, and storyteller Maria Pinto will share insights from her groundbreaking work on Black mushroom love across Africa and the diaspora.
Her book, “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless” explores fungi as agents of nourishment, survival, memory, and community, inviting readers to see mushrooms as vital participants in human history and ecological imagination.
Aurelija Plūkė — Mycology Educator & TV Host
Lithuania-based educator Aurelija Plūkė is the creator and host of Lithuania’s first national television program devoted entirely to mushrooms. What began as macro-photographic curiosity has grown into a life’s work of teaching fungal ecology, culture, and wonder. Through forays, workshops, and cross-disciplinary collaborations,from museums to sustainability events, Plūkė helps audiences move beyond “edible or not?” and into the deeper stories fungi tell.
Plūkė also founded her own functional and medicinal mushroom brand.
About the Telluride Mushroom Festival
Founded in 1980, the Telluride Mushroom Festival celebrates the many roles fungi play in our lives: from ecology and medicine to food, art, and culture.
The Festival is produced annually in Telluride, Colorado, drawing thousands of attendees from around the world.
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