Pull up the MOJA Arts Festival page this week and you'll see eight days, September 24 through October 1. Those are the festival's main promotional calendar dates. Five College of Charleston performances tied to this same festival run through October 4, ticketed through a different box office, at Chapel Theatre.
If you live here and you're building your week around MOJA, that distinction matters.
The Festival's Eight-Day Run
As reported by The Post and Courier, this is the 42nd year of MOJA, and it's the first year the festival hasn't been run directly out of the City of Charleston's Office of Cultural Affairs. A newly formed nonprofit called MOJA Arts took over programming this year. The festival's run is eight days this year, down from eleven days in past years.
That's not a small trim. Past festivals stretched programming across nearly two weeks. This year compresses the same ambitions, roughly the same number of ticketed marquee events, into eight days. The math on that alone tells you something: more is happening per day this year than in recent memory, which is exactly why a reader trying to plan around a single printed schedule can lose track of what's actually available and where.
Four Cultural Legacies at MOJA 2026
MOJA 2026 spotlights four specific cultural legacies across its programming: Barbados, Jamaica, Sierra Leone, and Gullah Geechee culture. That shows up in concrete ways rather than as a banner line. The Reggae Block Dance on September 25 features Kenyatta "Culture" Hill, son of the late reggae artist Joseph Hill, performing at Hampton Park. The Food Truck Cookoff that same day at Hampton Park's Rose Pavilion has three finalists competing with Gullah-inspired dishes for a $1,000 prize judged by a celebrity panel.
For returning festivalgoers, those cultural legacies are one feature to look for in this year's lineup.
The Main Festival Schedule
Here's what the eight official days look like, venue by venue, based on what's confirmed right now, with event details reported by Charleston City Paper:
September 24 opens at 11 a.m. with a free celebration at Marion Square, a picnic, and a drumline battle between bands from Burke, Timberland, and Woodland high schools. That evening, at 7 p.m., the MOJA Community Heroes Gala, a black-tie dinner, takes over the South Carolina Aquarium at 100 Wharf Street.
September 25 is the festival's busiest single day. At noon, the Juried Art Exhibition launches with a 5 p.m. reception at City Gallery, 34 Prioleau Street, juried this year by artist Arun Drummond. The show itself runs through October 25, well past the festival's own close. At 6 p.m., Hampton Park hosts both the Reggae Block Dance and the Food Truck Cookoff.
September 26 starts with MOJA Fitness, a 9 a.m. wellness event at Hampton Park, and closes with a New Jack Swing concert led by MOJA's artistic director Charlton Singleton at Charleston Music Hall, doors at 7 p.m.
September 27 splits the afternoon and evening between two very different rooms. At 4 p.m., MOJA Gospel brings a lineup led by the Rev. Randolph Miller to Greater St. Luke AME Church. At 7 p.m., poets Marcus Amaker and A$iahMae, Charleston's first and second poets laureate, perform "Black Frequencies" at Cannon Street Arts Center, pairing live poetry with electronic music and projected visual art.
September 29 brings jazz artist Jazmin Ghent to Dock Street Theatre at 7 p.m., with Seth Gaillard opening.
The festival's final stretch closes with a free, family-friendly concert at Hampton Park built around the 50th anniversary of a run of 1976 albums, including Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Parliament's Mothership Connection, Marvin Gaye's I Want You, Earth, Wind & Fire's Spirit, the Sparkle soundtrack from Curtis Mayfield, and the Isley Brothers' Harvest for the World. It's produced by Ray Chew, music director for Dancing with the Stars, alongside Charleston's own Tommy Brown.
College Performances Beyond the Main Festival Dates
The College of Charleston performances are listed separately from the main festival schedule. The College of Charleston's Department of Theatre and Dance is hosting five MOJA-affiliated performances this year at Chapel Theatre, 172 Calhoun Street, a venue separate from the Hampton Park, Dock Street Theatre, and Marion Square sites listed above. This partnership runs through the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and has been part of MOJA's programming for years, and this year, under the direction of theatre performance instructor Gary DeWitt Marshall, the performances continue beyond the main festival dates.
Two of those performances land on October 3 and 4, two and three days after the main festival's stated close. Marshall's own solo piece, A Masterpiece in Progress, runs Saturday, October 3, at 7 p.m., recommended for audiences 16 and up. Palmetto Pulitzer Poets follows on October 4, also at 7 p.m. Tickets for the CofC slate run through the George Street Box Office, a separate system from CityPaperTickets.com, where the main festival's ticketed events are sold.
For anyone following the main festival calendar, those separate dates and ticketing details are worth noting.
Reading The Festival Like You Live Here
If you're building a week around MOJA rather than a single afternoon, the geography matters as much as the dates. Hampton Park carries the festival's outdoor, free, and family-oriented programming: the fitness event, the reggae dance, the cookoff, and the closing concert. Dock Street Theatre and Charleston Music Hall carry the ticketed concert programming. Cannon Street Arts Center and Greater St. Luke AME Church host the more intimate, single-evening events. City Gallery's exhibition is the one piece of MOJA that quietly runs a full month past everything else, through October 25, so there's no urgency to catch it during the festival week itself.
And if poetry or theatre from the College of Charleston lineup is what actually draws you, plan for the first weekend of October, not the last weekend of September, and go through the George Street Box Office rather than the festival's main ticketing link.
Those details can help you plan your week around the events that interest you.
We put a piece like this together the same way we'd walk a client through a complicated closing timeline: read past the summary, cross-check the dates against the primary sources, and flag the part that trips people up before it does. That habit is the same one we bring to the historic sales and off-market work we do across the peninsula. If you're weighing a move in Charleston, whether that's a first look at South of Broad or a longer conversation about timing a sale, the team at Oyster Point Real Estate Group is at 72 King Street and glad to talk it through.
