Welcome to Brainchild Festival, our three day festival celebrating creativity, bold ideas & DIY spirit at a peer-to-peer level.
We connect and stitch together the collectives, communities and creative projects that inspire us throughout the year into a program of live music, jam sessions, spoken word, DJ sets, talks, workshops, film, theatre and installation art.
The festival is not-for-profit and was started by a group of friends in their first year of university, growing organically every year since. It is now a celebration and gathering of an ever-growing network of creative people, with a capacity of just under 3000 people. Artists, crew and festival-goers camp together, with no VIP areas on site.
Across the weekend, we create opportunities for valuable conversations, exchanges and collaborations and welcome everybody to get involved. Built up by friends of friends over the years, the atmosphere is warm, open and relaxed. Brainchild is the perfect place to let your guard down, try things out and discover new wonders. We hope that you will find something you love this year.
Winners of the AIM Award for Best Independent Festival 2015 & 2016!
★★★★ - The Independent
Tickets for our 2019 festival are going on sale in the last week of January, stay tuned for those earlybirds! 👀
Each festival, over 300 leading & emerging artists contribute their work and ideas, be they art installations, led discussions or DJ sets. So far, we’ve been lucky enough to work with artists including Sons of Kemet, Shanti Celeste, PECS, Kojey Radical, Nubya Garcia, Dego (2000Black), Ross From Friends, Caleb Femi, Ezra Collective, Loyle Carner, Moses Boyd Exodus, Alice Phoebe Lou and hundreds of other brilliant people.
Our first lineup release for 2019 will be in late February. Applications for Brainchild 2019 are open! So if you would like to apply to perform or exhibit an installation at Brainchild Festival 2019, please check out the forms below.
Proposing an Art Installation
If you want to propose an art installation, please read and complete our application form by midnight on the 17th February 2019. Click here to see the form.
Proposing play/perform as a band, DJ, speaker, workshop leader, theatre company, poet, filmmaker or performance artist (or anything in between!)
If you’d like to bring your creative project to the festival then please read and complete this form by midnight on the 15th March 2019. Click here to see the form.
Hatch is back for 2019! Oh how we’ve missed steamy, funny nights at Platform together. For anyone who doesn’t know – Hatch is our platform for creators to share new ideas and works in progress with a friendly audience. And we’re getting going programming the next one, so if you have new ideas to try…
What’s going on with Brainchild? People have been asking us this question a lot over the past few months, and after much figuring out, we are finally in a place to tell you about it. This year was in many ways our most wonderful festival, but it was also the toughest on all of us…
Following a tour of festivals around the globe and ahead of a second album launch, Afro/Cuban music collective Ariwo will be landing at Brainchild Festival this summer! Writer Olivia Atkins went to find out more about their experimental and improvised sets.
Photography: Hollie Fernando
Please note that the deadline for proposing art installations or applying to perform have passed.
To join the team, please check out this page to see what roles are available.
For London based projects please check out Platform, our HQ in Southwark, London where we put on events and projects – maybe your idea can happen there.
Festival Inquiries:
To volunteer on the festival green team email ollie or hannah
To be on the build and break team email josh or matt
For general on-site volunteering email tomo
For food trading inquiries email jasper
For press email marina
For any other enquiries email team
@brainchildfestival.co.uk