A 2025 National Storytelling Festival Preview
On the heels of his winning debut as an Exchange Place performer at the 2023 National Storytelling Festival, Tim Ereneta will return to Jonesborough in October as a first-time featured performer. He’s one of four “new voices” in attendance this year.
Apart from a brief interlude at Northwestern University, Ereneta has always lived in California. (He currently resides in Berkeley.) He went to school to take advantage of Northwestern’s killer theater program, expecting to emerge as a stage actor or a playwright. A chance encounter with a storyteller who performed in his English class changed the course of his career.
“All the stuff I thought a good actor would do, that performer wasn’t doing,” Ereneta says. “But after 30 seconds, all that judgment went out the window. I was lost in the story.” He was interested to note that his fellow classmates felt the same way. When the story had a jump scare, an entire room of college students almost fell out of their seats.
Ereneta soon learned that a professor in his theater department had deep ties to the storytelling world. Thus he became one of the few trained actors who was aware of storytelling as its own art form early in the game. (It’s more common for actors to stumble upon storytelling after a phase of experimentation, under the proud, if false, impression that they invented a whole new mode of art making.) Ereneta attended the National Storytelling Festival for the first time in the early 1990s, and found himself “spellbound.” He hung on every word of Ray Hicks and other tellers.
Back in California, Ereneta was still pursuing acting and writing. But stories just kept bubbling up in his performances, often unexpectedly. On one occasion he found that he was the only person telling stories at a theater-focused fringe festival in San Francisco. Another time, when he forgot to prepare material for a comedy writers’ workshop, he launched into a traditional version of Cinderella.
“I got a huge response,” he says. “They were much more interested in Cinderella than any joke I had written previously. They were laughing. They were cringing. They were jumping out of their seats. They were so excited to hear this fairy tale. I think these people hadn’t heard anyone tell them a story since they were young.”
Ereneta began to recognize he had a special talent, but observing that audience, he also identified a need. “Everybody should get to exercise their imaginations,” he says. “Not just five- and six-year-olds.”
Today, Ereneta focuses on traditional folk and fairy tales from Europe and Central Asia, as well as epic tales from the Kalevala, sourced from the Finnish oral tradition. To bring these stories to life, he works within a cinematic scope. “It’s a very visual art form for me as a performer, all about creating images,” he says. “I’m happy to use words instead of drawing or putting them on film.”
Indeed, Ereneta compares his work and traditional stories in general to popular TV shows like “Severance” or “Game of Thrones.” “These stories are juicy and compelling,” he says. “I like to remind people that we’ve been telling them for eons. It’s not just since the invention of cable TV and prestige streaming services.”
Just don’t expect him to tell any personal stories — Ereneta finds real life far too boring. In Jonesborough, expect gripping folk lore and absorbing epics if you seek him out in the tents.
Tim Ereneta is the latest featured teller in our New Voice series, a preview of the 52nd Annual National Storytelling Festival. You can read our profiles of April Armstrong, Sufian Zhemukhov, and Lipbone Redding on the ISC website. Join us for the Festival in Jonesborough October 3-5, 2025.