Belgrade Design Week

Founded in 2005, as a true rarity in the world of festivals – as a non-profit NGO, Belgrade Design Week is the first festival of creative industries and modern business in Serbia and the South East European region, covering an area home to more than 100 million people from Milan to Istanbul.

For 15 years now, Belgrade Design Week has successfully forged intercultural and business connections between the global design scene, the regional creative industries and the city of Belgrade. With its concept BDW renews, within a contemporary context, the tradition of grand international festivals of culture such as Bitef, Fest and Bemus, recognizing the complete lack of the creative industries’ presentation, and adding for the first time Belgrade and Serbia to the global design map. Belgrade is a city of great festival culture, but also of equally grand festival expectations, nurtured in the golden age of socialism.

Apart from the massive pro-European audience of the highest quality, composed of opinion makers and creative leaders of the whole region, what makes Belgrade Design Week and our creative conference so special and different is most of all the impressive participants list, which constantly grows and each year involves more and more global leaders in the creative industries. In the past fifeteen years the list of esteemed participants of Belgrade Design Week, lecturers at our conference, exhibitors at our events and workshops, includes more than 500 leading international creatives, artists, architects, designers, branding and advertising experts, curators, publishers, entrepreneurs, critics, in one word – the Greatest Creative Minds of the 21st Century - next to whom we presented over 2000 local and regaional creatives.

Some of the world’s superstars who were guests of Belgrade, the Belgraders and Belgrade Design Week are Ross Lovegrove, Daniel Libeskind, Karim Rashid, Peter Saville, Luigi Collani, Patrizia Urquiola, Droog Design, Askan Mergenthaler of Herzog&Meuron, Juergen H. Mayer, Tony Chambers, Marcus Fairs, Konstantin Grcic, Patrizia Moroso, Shin Azumi, Paola Antonelli, to name just a few...

To most of them the participation at Belgrade Design Week was in the same time their very first visit to Belgrade, Serbia and the whole region, but also a unique chance for the local and regional creatives and professionals to get introduced with their work and ideas live from the first row.