The living world is stitched together by a diversity of beings whose rich and complex interactions define its everyday drama. Humans—despite their disproportionate capacity to modify the living world—comprise only a small part of this vast web of relations. Yet, anthropocentrism has been a hallmark of much of academia, legal practice, and culture for decades.

That, however, is changing. Practitioners and scholars from a wide range of disciplines—from law and philosophy to anthropology to design and well beyond—are pursuing efforts to bring the more-than-human world into the ambit of moral, legal, and social concern. 

The More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Festival of Ideas is dedicated to exploring this rich and rapidly evolving field. Unfolding over three days—from March 12th to 14th, 2025—at New York University School of Law, the MOTH Festival of Ideas will feature leading thinkers and doers working to advance the rights, interests, and well-being of nonhumans, humans, and the web of life that sustains us all. The Festival is organized by the MOTH Program at NYU Law.

The mornings of each day of the Festival will be dedicated to a closed-door, interactive academic conference which will examine philosophical, scientific, legal, and cultural perspectives on more-than-human rights and other ecocentric paradigms.

The afternoons of each day of the Festival will be open to the public, with tickets available for purchase. With creativity and interdisciplinarity at its heart, the Festival will include keynote talks, interviews, film screenings, book launches, poetry readings, concerts, and performances of various kinds.