Jogja Festivals Forum and Expo 2026 will launch as an annual event by Jogja Festivals. It will be held on April 15-16 at Pusat Desain Industri Nasional (PDIN), with the theme “Festival as Cultural & Economic Infrastructure.” As the creative and tourism industries expand, festivals are becoming more important.
In many cities, festivals help shape regional identity, create new economic opportunities, and make tourism more unique. JFFE 2026 aims to show how festivals can connect communities, industries, and markets into a single ecosystem.
Jogja Festivals Forum and Expo 2026 featured four special sessions, including a symposium on building festival resilience in Southeast Asia. The symposium offered a space to discuss how festivals in the region are developing and what challenges they face. Here, festivals are seen as part of an ecosystem that must continually adapt to social, economic, and technological changes.
The second session, the Forum Festival & Tourism Industry, showed how festivals have become a key driver of tourism in Yogyakarta. The forum also introduced the Jogja Festivals Package Trip, called “FESTICITY,” which is a travel concept that blends festivals with local destinations and experiences. This program shows how festivals can be more closely linked with tourism.
Another session was the Festival & Creative Economy Forum, which looked at how festivals can boost the creative economy. The forum included the Hexahelix Dialogue, bringing together people from government, academia, business, communities, and the media. This discussion gave everyone a chance to talk about how festivals can strengthen the creative economy and to share ideas for building a creative roadmap in Yogyakarta.
Jogja Festivals Forum and Expo 2026 also offers an exhibition space for festival organizers and creative professionals. There are also initiatives to develop creative products based on festivals, encouraging new works that reflect local identity.