Vivid Sydney — 2025 Festival

The 2025 Vivid Sydney program sought to explore new ways of presenting ideas. Through nearly 30 events in the Vivid Ideas program, presented over the course of the festival’s 23 nights, we invited our audience to dream, unpacking the very many meanings and interpretations of the festival’s creative direction.

We hosted First Nations storytelling around a campfire at the culturally-rich Barangaroo Reserve, presented an exhibition showcasing the future of extended and virtual reality, and staged immersive screenings of cult horror films atop the old Sydney Burial Ground. We welcomed an array of global storytellers to our stage, offering insights and inspiration from the inimitable Martha Stewart, sleep scientist Matthew Walker, mountaineering filmmaker Jimmy Chin, and comedy legends Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. We kept the doors open late at Sydney’s biggest cultural institutions. And we commissioned major new works, from the breathtaking physical theatre of Legs On The Wall to a significant new film by speculative architect Liam Young. 

Curator, Vivid Ideas: Mitchell Oakley Smith