Sally Oberstein - A Convergence of Instigators

Sally Oberstein, visionary and Director of Alaska World Arts Festival, Homer, Alaska

In Alaska, the bumblebee (Bombas) is a familiar summer sight: hard-working, focused, social, a great generalist pollinator that thrives across location and flower type. Sally Oberstein is the human counterpart to the conspicuous Alaska bumblebee: an enthusiastic pollinator and team player who brings culture and connections to bloom.

Sally is the innovative force behind Homer’s Alaska World Arts Festival, and on this night, early in the 2026 Festival run, Sally is flitting from table to table at Alice’s Champagne Palace in downtown Homer. Paris Chansons, a French music ensemble with a repertoire of French, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Russian, Italian, and American standards, is still 15 minutes from taking the stage and the volume of conversation and anticipation at Alice’s is rising. Sally approaches a table, comes in close, greets patrons by name, takes the hands of friends into her own as she laughs and nods enthusiastically, then she works steadily around the room. Soon every table and bar stool is filled. Sally radiates. The band is fancy – one singer in a green lace gown; another in a dark double-breasted suit with a pocket scarf; a jaunty hat is on the guitarist – but Sally looks like Homer-ite on date night: comfy pants, a slouchy sweater, sunglasses perched on her head holding back thick, wind-tussled hair. Sally knows her audience; the hooting and mad clapping as she approaches the mic show that the audience knows (and loves, appreciates) Sally.

Alice’s Champagne Palace fills for paris chansons at alaska world arts festival, july 2026

Now entering its 8th season, the Alaska World Arts Festival is quite an endeavor for a town of 6,331 people, offering performances and artists from around the globe. This years’ lineup spans geography and genre and features Paris Chansons; a stand-up comedian from the Ozarks; a marquee, hand-painted mural of a breaching humpback whale; a Billy Joel tribute live at The Porcupine Theater; Improv; storytellers from across Alaska; and a 48-hour filmmaking slam. Festivals past have included an ABBA cover band; musicians from Turkey and Poland; Czech puppetry; dance of Kenya, Cambodia, Argentina; circus arts; and, most years, a new play (comedic, musical) written and produced by Sally and staring local Homer actors and musicians. 

The spark for the Alaska World Arts Festival came to Sally some years ago when she visited the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sally’s friend, Mary Langham, invited her to the Fringe and Sally was so inspired she uttered, out loud, her wish to host something like it in Homer. Sally remembers the moment: “A man from Melbourne [at the Fringe] told me: ‘You can’t have an arts festival in Homer!’” thinking it too backwater, perhaps too unsophisticated, or the town too unheard-of to even contemplate something so grand. “So, of course I set to it!” Sally exclaims. “Homer is the perfect place. Such Serendipity! Such a convergence of instigators! I went home and we made it happen here.”   

When Sally considers why Homer is the perfect place for arts and convergence, she offers: “We are all here for this place, first,” referencing the abundant natural beauty, the outdoor experiences, and the wildness of the lower Kenai Peninsula. “And beyond that,” she says, referring to the creative, collaborative, and curious spirits of Homer-ites, “I like to orchestrate a bit, others orchestrate other bits, and we work toward a moment in time. As we experience art – on stage or in the audience – we have a common experience, together. Everything else falls away.”

That commonality and convergence is both a starting point and the end game for Sally; you will notice she said, “We made it happen here” not “I made it happen here.” In every sentence Sally offers on the planning and production of the Festival, she peppers in the names of local Homer folk, her prized collaborators, who help her pull off the magic: a writer here, a local house painter there, a former mayor: “We are fishermen to homesteaders to students,” she says of the proponents and participants of her grand-scale artistic output. She then points, laughingly, to a TV show of her youth that modeled how she chooses to work: “Remember the ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’? I would have loved that job,” she says of the fictional newsroom of WJM-TV in Minneapolis – those characters, that humor, the pressure and deadline of the 6 o’clock news show. “They all worked together. Collaboration. You never doubted [they could pull it off] for one second.” 

Comedy is a cornerstone of the Festival and is present in much of Sally’s work. “Humor is a release valve,” she says. “Every hard issue we face – aging, divorce, isolation, misunderstanding - humor puts it in a light that makes you see it in another way.” The 2026 Alaska World Arts Festival line-up includes a comic, Nancy Norton, a “retired fifth-generation nurse” and a “Certified Humor Professional” who will perform stand-up one night and present a workshop the next day called “Tromedy: The Power of Comedy” that teaches comedy and other forms of expression to address stress and trauma in everyday life. The nurse/comedian’s mantra is “Humor is not only a painkiller, it also boosts immunity and our mood.” The comedian has professional knowledge of humor as antidote and scientific evidence provided by the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humor (a real thing!). Sally believes it. “My own father, when he was hospitalized, sent me videos of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Humor was his thing. I so appreciated it, how he moved through illness. Humor is a medication, a remedy.” 

Nancy norton, Comedy as healing. Photo by Nancy Norton.

Sally has traveled the world and has seen how arts and comedy provide distraction; help humans tease apart important elements, even contradictions, of culture; and can provide connective, healing energy in times of division or strife. Sally seeks performers from faraway places in her travels and then invites them, with characteristic enthusiasm, to perform in Homer. She sees something she likes, and she asks: “There are a lot of asks,” she notes, and some of those artists end up on the playbill of the Alaska World Arts Festival. “Sally is like a first magnitude spring,” says Homer resident and arts patron, Beth Nelson. “The kind you find in Missouri or Arkansas - a spring that is wrapped by a quarry with millions of gallons of water flowing up out of it.”

Sally both gives to, and receives (mightily) from, the Alaska World Arts Festival. The planning, the production, the seeking of supportive funding is a never-ending cycle. “When you work with the people I work with, the experience supports you, you get stronger,” she says. “I don’t know if art is going to win, but the spirit of these people working together might.” 

Resources:

Alaska World Arts Festival:  https://www.alaskaworldarts.org/

Photos provided by Alaska World Arts and Tracy Nordstrom