NEW Moon Fest — Nantucket Empowering Women
NEW Moon Fest was born from a moment of uncertainty, inspired by a community’s determination not to let something meaningful disappear.
For thirteen years, Nantucket’s LUNAFEST screening was more than a film festival. It was a cherished rite of spring, bringing the community together to celebrate women’s stories, creativity, courage, and resilience. Each Memorial Day weekend, audiences converged in joy and camaraderie at the historic Siasconset Casino to reconnect after the long island winter and to experience the power of films created by and about women, films honoring the feminine spirit and its resilience.
When LUNAFEST1 announced a national pause in 2023 after more than two decades, Nantucket faced the possibility of losing one of its most beloved annual traditions. Yet what might have been an ending instead became an invitation: an opportunity to imagine something new while honoring all that had come before.
Recognizing both the loss and the possibility, Nantucket Community Television (then) Executive Director, Lisa Getter, reached out to Lisa Soeder (the woman who introduced LUNAFEST to Nantucket in 2010 as a Theatre Workshop fund/friend-raiser) to partner with her in the creation of a female-centric shorts festival. And, in the tradition of the strong resourceful women who have shaped Nantucket throughout its history, the two pivoted and chose not simply to preserve the festival’s legacy but to build upon it. NCTV hired the talented Stephanie Serra as the event’s Program Director for the start-up, and hit the ground running.
The result was NEW (an acronym for Nantucket Empowering Women) Moon Fest: an original Nantucket-based international short film festival whose name reflects its core mission.
Like the new moon itself, every beginning emerges from darkness. Though unseen, the moon’s gravitational pull remains powerful. NEW Moon Fest embraces that same truth, celebrating the profound influence of women’s voices, stories, and leadership, whether visible on the world’s stage or quietly transforming lives every day.
Today, with Getter and Soeder at the helm as co-founders and co-chairs, and a host committee to curate, NEW Moon Fest combines independently curated international short films with the warmth, camaraderie, and community spirit that made Nantucket’s LUNAFEST so beloved. Each Memorial Day Weekend, more than 350 people gather on the eastern shores of Nantucket at the iconic Siasconset Casino to celebrate storytelling, connection, and the enduring power of women’s experiences.
Since its founding in 2024, NEW Moon Fest has raised funds for Nantucket Community Television, supporting programming that engages, entertains, educates, and connects the island community, and for A Safe Place, whose mission is to support and empower individuals affected by domestic violence, sexual violence, and abuse.
LUNAFEST in Nantucket — Its History and Evolution
LUNAFEST Under Theatre Workshop of Nantucket
The origins of NEW Moon Fest reach back to 2010, when Lisa Soeder, then Chair of Theatre Workshop of Nantucket’s Development Committee, attended a LUNAFEST screening in Florida and immediately recognized its potential to resonate with Nantucket audiences.
The first Nantucket event, hosted by the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, with the strong support of TWN’s then Executive Director, Gabrielle Gould, was held at the Green Barn at Westmoor. Two screenings were planned for seventy-five guests each. Not a single ticket had been sold in advance. As attendees arrived and filled both screenings, Soeder welcomed them, jokingly confessing she had feared that she had planned a festival no one would attend.
The concern was short-lived.
What began as a modest friend/fundraiser quickly became one of Nantucket’s most anticipated annual events. The festival found its permanent home at the historic Siasconset Casino, where attendance grew year after year, resulting in early sell-outs and oversold events. Under Soeder’s leadership from 2010 through 2017, even with modest ticket costs starting at $25 and growing to $40 during this period, Nantucket’s LUNAFEST became the highest-performing fundraiser in the national LUNAFEST network while simultaneously supporting Theatre Workshop of Nantucket and the Breast Cancer Fund.
The partnership felt almost destined. The moon, a symbol prominent in the logos of both LUNAFEST and Theatre Workshop, served as a fitting emblem for an event devoted to illuminating stories that often deserve greater visibility.
In 2018, after Soeder stepped down as event chair, Theatre Workshop shifted its fundraising focus toward its own productions, cabarets, and an annual gala.
LUNAFEST Under Nantucket Community Television
Recognizing that a film festival naturally aligned with a film organization, Getter and Arlene O’Reilly, then Marketing Director, approached Soeder about transferring the event to Nantucket Community Television. Theatre Workshop was amenable, and the smooth transition ensured that the beloved festival would continue under the tutelage of a new organizational home uniquely suited to its cinematic mission.
But despite the easy transition, the start was rough and NCTV shepherded the festival through extraordinary challenges. During the pandemic, LUNAFEST’s 2021 screening moved to the Nantucket Dreamland Theatre, where audiences participated both in person (separated by seats per COVID protocols) and remotely. The festival returned to the Siasconset Casino for 2022 and 2023, maintaining its place in the community even during uncertain times. Then, when the national LUNAFEST program ceased operations, Nantucket once again adapted.
Rather than allowing a treasured tradition to disappear, Getter and Soeder reimagined it. And NEW Moon Fest emerged not as a replacement, but as an evolution: a festival deeply inspired by LUNAFEST’s legacy while charting its own course with independent curation, an international perspective, and a distinctly Nantucket identity. Nantucket welcomed this iteration with open arms and hearts.
The Spirit of NEW Moon Fest
Rooted in Nantucket’s elemental beauty and shaped by generations of pioneering women, NEW Moon Fest celebrates creativity, resilience, intuition, and transformation.
Inspired by the Wild Woman archetype, the festival honors the voice within every woman that trusts her own wisdom and embraces possibility. It celebrates authenticity over expectation, imagination over limitation, and community over isolation. Strong ties to Mother Earth ground the festival in connection—to our bodies, to one another, and to the natural cycles of renewal and transformation.
The natural rhythms of the moon provide both symbol and guide. Just as the lunar cycle continually renews itself, women’s empowerment is not a single achievement but rather a cycle of beginnings — chosen, repeated, shared. Because our strength and our resilience lie in our collective power to begin again and again, on our own terms, in community with others. It is found in the courage to start anew, the strength to persevere through change, and the willingness to support one another along the way.
At its heart, NEW Moon Fest believes that women’s stories matter in all their richness and complexity. Through bold filmmaking and shared discovery, the festival creates space for stories of resilience and vulnerability, belonging and becoming, for transformation, quiet influence and unmistakable strength.
Like the new moon itself, these stories remind us that what is not yet visible can still hold extraordinary power.
1 LUNAFEST Nationwide
Launched in 2001, LUNAFEST was designed as a traveling short-film festival with a mission to champion women filmmakers, amplify underrepresented voices, and raise money for nonprofit organizations. Its screenings brought communities together through films by and about women, until its corporate parent was acquired in 2023 and thereafter Luna ceased curating and sharing short films. But for the majority of its life-span, LUNAFEST curated a slate of films annually for distribution to hosting charities in consideration of a donation to The Breast Cancer Fund of 15% of net proceeds raised at host community events. In its last years, LUNAFEST shifted from the percentage donation to The Breast Cancer Fund to a $350 donation benefitting Chicken & Egg Pictures which champions women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers around the globe with funding, mentorship, and access so they can tell stories that ignite change. During its tenure, LUNAFEST showcased more than 175 filmmakers and raised more than $7 million for nonprofits.
