The Atlantic Festival is adding a number of high-profile Hollywood stars to the lineup for its 2025 event, taking place in New York for the first time.
The festival has added panel discussions between Robert Downey Jr. and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar and between David Letterman and comedian writer-director Richard Ayoade.
The festival will also highlight three notable fall TV series, hosting an exclusive first look of season three of Netflix’s The Diplomat, followed by a conversation with stars Keri Russell and Allison Janney and creator/showrunner Debora Cahn. There will also be a sneak peek screening of FX’s The Lowdown with a talk with creator, writer-director Sterlin Harjo and star Ethan Hawke. And the event will be the site of the premiere screening of Ken Burns‘ documentary series The American Revolution, where Burns will be joined by Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures in the docuseries, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed.
Though this year’s festival will be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, it’ll also take place at other venues throughout the city including the Tenement Museum, the Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hauser & Wirth and McNally Jackson Seaport.
And there will be select events around the city, under the festival’s new Out and Abouts category.
Those events include Atlantic Reads book talks at McNally Jackson Seaport with Walter Mosley, Susan Orlean and more; the premiere of Dread Beat an’ Blood at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring a live performance by poet Linton Kwesi Johnson; and Big Story Live events at downtown venues including “What Does It Mean to Be an American?” at the Tenement Museum and “The Future of the Arts in a Changing World” at Hauser & Wirth, where Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg will be joined by Noah Hawley and Apollo executive producer Kamilah Forbes.
Other speakers added to the Atlantic Festival today include NYU Stern School marketing professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway, clinical psychologist and founder and CEO of Good Inside Becky Kennedy and chef Andrew Zimmern.
“We’re bringing the festival to New York for the first time because The Atlantic is growing across every dimension, and our public presence in New York should be bigger than it’s been,” Goldberg said in a statement. “Half of our employees work out of our New York headquarters now, and we have so many subscribers across the metropolitan area. The Atlantic Festival, which is meant to be a convening of some of the greatest writers, scientists and cultural figures working today, is a great fit for a world capital like New York.”
The 17th annual Atlantic Festival is set to take place from Sept. 18-20 in New York.