2024 Keynote Speaker & Master of Ceremonies
Last updated March 7, 2024
Tea Uglow - Keynote Speaker
Tea Uglow is an Atypical Creative Thinker engaged to keynote and consult on future trends and exploring cultural-digital interfaces with corporations, agents, creative agencies, individual creators and producers at the boundaries of traditional cultural practice - across theatre, literature, history, cinema, music, science and the circus.
Tea founded Creative Labs for Google in London (2007) and Sydney (2012) where she worked with cultural organisations on digital experiments. Her book, A Universe Explodes, was a proto-NFT blockchain artefact and won a 2018 Peabody award for digital storytelling. In 2023 that project was featured in a British Library exhibition.
In May 2018 Tea was celebrated as one of Australia's #OUT50 LGBTQ Leaders by Deloitte and in the same month Editions at Play was awarded a Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award.
In Oct 2017 Tea gave a keynote at the AIGA annual conference in Minneapolis: You can watch the whole talk - or just the Q&A with Roman Mars (swoon).
In May 2016 she spoke at the Sydney Writers Festival on Doubt as a Creative Catalyst. During the talk Tea acknowledged that she is transgender, and transitioning. The talk was made into a book and is available as a podcast.
Tea’s TEDx talk has close to (or may have surpassed by now) 2 million views. In 2023 she was President of the Cannes Glass Jury. She was President of Spikes’ Influencer jury in 2022, D&AD’s Digital Jury in 2018 and sat on the board of D&AD for 3 years.
As a queer activist she co-authored the trans pride flag emoji 🏳️⚧️ proposal and has written several books including an anthology of LGBTQ speeches called Loud and Proud.
"Tea was nothing short of brilliant! The content, the delivery, the personal connection with the audience, the authenticity and inspiration all combined to make Tea one of the strongest headliners for this year’s festival.
We had excellent feedback from the delegates about Tea - she was one of the most frequently mentioned speakers in our feedback analysis (for being one of the highlights of the festival!)."
Nick Cain - Master of Ceremonies
Nick Cain is an award-winning Australian performing artist and creative professional.
Known for over 20 years as a multi-dimensional communicator that’s charismatic, thoughtful and funny - his skills are found in alternating between acting, voice, presenting and creative production to suit the role.
His onstage presence is directly inspired by his work across multiple industries. Whether it’s helping create content for some of the world’s biggest brand, to making you feel something on stage and screen, it’s about triggering new possibilities through the power of human connection.
Bringing a wealth of infectious humour, charm and energy to any speaking engagement, Nick has a particular interest in merging his comedy stylings, alongside performance and people engagement knowledge to develop electric experiences.