About Thea Skelton, Festival Director of Dubai Lynx

Thea has been running Dubai Lynx, the Middle East and North Africa’s sister festival to Cannes Lions for seven years. Having been based in Dubai for over 14 years she is very familiar with the region’s creative communications and events industry. Thea has worked across a diverse range of events during her career,  including numerous large- scale experiential campaigns and awards for the UAE government and major brands including Harvey Nichols, YSL and Gucci. Prior to her work in the Middle East, she was based at Guardian News and Media in the UK for five years. As part of their marketing team she managed a range of sponsorship and events from Hay literary festival and the Guardian first book award to Glastonbury. Thea loves her work with Dubai Lynx and has a fundamental belief that creativity is at the heart of all good business.

About her thoughts for the industry

I’m extremely proud that Dubai Lynx provides a platform for creative excellence and effectiveness in the Middle East and North Africa and even prouder to bring the festival back physically for 2023. We believe that great things happen when we’re in a position to bring people together. A very special breed of creativity exists when we embrace community.  

We can see lots of exciting shifts taking place in the Middle East and North Africa. We have seen evidence of just how much creativity’s power to drive progress for business, people and society resonates with our community. MENA has produced ground-breaking and life changing work, and it’s clear that creatives in the region are also showing up globally in a big way.  The UAE moved up a place in the location rankings in the 2022 Lions Creativity Report, which is the definitive global rankings for creative excellence in branded communications, in addition to celebrating two Grands Prix at Cannes Lions in 2022. 

Saudi Arabia has embedded creativity into its 2030 plan and is using creativity as a driving force for growth. This can be evidenced in the increasing number of entries we have seen at Lynx for KSA, as well as on the global stage at Cannes Lions. 

We’re looking forward to celebrating the winning work this year which will really showcase the level of excellence coming from the region and the new trends emerging from a ‘post pandemic’ body of work. The deep insights from this year’s work will be explored, in-depth in the Dubai Lynx Creativity Report, providing the official rankings for this year’s top performing Networks, Agencies and Companies from across the region.

We look forward to seeing examples of work emerge from Dubai Lynx this year that will propel the performance of brands involved and show how creatives from MENA are innovating.