World Youth Alliance’s cultural programs provide young people with the opportunity to encounter and experience the dignity of the human person. Participation in the arts, either as artist or observer, engages and nurtures all dimensions of the human person – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual - and in this way promotes the integral development of the individual, contributing to the authentic develop of society as a whole.

The arts provide an avenue for the individual to experience a transcendent beauty. This beauty is an objective good that draws individuals into a deeper contemplation of their human condition and the nature of the world. With subtlety and depth, the arts inspire honest self-reflection and foster a spirit of awe in the face of a beauty that surpasses human understanding.

For these reasons, the World Youth Alliance provides opportunities for young artists to perfect their particular craft, while also encouraging all young people to deepen their understanding and appreciation of the arts.

Cultural Programs offered by the World Youth Alliance 

Manhattan International Film Festival

Each year, the World Youth Alliance launches an international film competition to gather the work of young film directors committed to portraying authentic accounts of the human experience. The best submissions are selected by a panel of judges and presented at the World Youth Alliance’s annual Manhattan-based film festival. The selected film directors travel to New York City to attend the World Youth Alliance’s film festival, which gathers film professionals while providing an array of events including film screenings, panel discussions, speakers, and social gatherings designed to forge personal connections.

Why film?

The art form of film is unique in its assimilation of music, movement, theater, and visual art. The cooperation of these disciplines masterfully delivers a coherent situation, worldview, or character representation, which challenges the viewer’s personal values and experiences. The World Youth Alliance wishes to encourage young film directors to realize this power of film to create a world that does, consciously and sub-consciously, inform human values, attitudes, and awareness, affecting one’s understanding of the human condition in all of its frailty, strength, constancy, and changeability.

World Youth Alliance Chamber Orchestra

In addition to supporting the work of young film directors, the World Youth Alliance also encourages the work of young musicians. The World Youth Alliance Chamber Orchestra was founded in 2010 to provide an opportunity for young pre-professional musicians to perform in an ensemble committed to musical excellence, while receiving encouragement to explore their personal and professional responsibility as musicians in today’s world. The ensemble consists of young musicians (ages 10-17) from Manhattan's most prestigious music programs including The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music. All musicians in the ensemble are members of the World Youth Alliance and perform nearly every month at venues such as the United Nations, Fairfield University, the American Bible Society, and other schools, festivals, and private functions. Most notably, members of the ensemble performed at World Youth Day in Spain during summer 2011.

Why music?

As an art form that is largely non-visual, music provides access to a dimension beyond one’s ordinary experience. It invites the imagination to a world that is not limited by what the eye can see, or what the intellect can rationally grasp. Music provides a real and tangible experience of the sheer energy, struggle and triumph of the human spirit. Forming a collaboration between composer, performing artist, and listener, music re-creates the exuberance and vibrancy of man’s joys, captures the intensity and turmoil of man’s deepest sorrows and agonies, displays the majesty and grandeur of the splendid and resplendent, and reveals the longing for stillness and peace through that which is simple and humble. In this way, music represents the fullness of the human experience, providing unique insight into the dignity of the human person.

International Conference for Artists

The process of understanding the dignity of the person is one that necessarily touches on the individual’s relationship to the transcendent. The arts communicate on this level of transcendence, transporting individuals to a space where the fullness and richness of the human experience may be encountered.

During November 2012, the World Youth Alliance will host an International Conference for Artists, gathering artists from a variety of disciplines representing diverse cultural backgrounds. The conference will provide a forum for conversation about the role of art in society. Furthermore, it will allow participants to explore how the World Youth Alliance’s foundational concepts are uniquely illuminated by an experience of the arts.

The conference will establish a sense of solidarity among artists internationally, who might otherwise find themselves lost in a world where ego dominates and the artist claims exclusive right to his/her artistic product. This meeting will gather a variety of perspectives and culminate in a World Youth Alliance statement articulating the relationship between arts and the dignity of the human person.