Our mission: to create opportunities to celebrate, experience, and explore the diversity of the world's cultures, through music and the arts. The Lotus Education and Arts Foundation was founded in Bloomington, Indiana in 1994. Anchored by the annual flagship Lotus World Music & Arts Festival, Lotus provides multicultural performing- and visual-arts programs year-round for participants of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. At its heart, Lotus is about creating community, sparking curiosity about other cultures, and inspiring human connections that transcend geography, religion, language, and ethnicity. Since its inception, Lotus has brought the wider world to the doorstep of hundreds of thousands of young people and adults throughout southern Indiana.