MIDSUMMA

Australia’s leading queer arts and culture organisation, Midsumma champions LGBTQIA+ creativity. Across 22 days, it invites people of every age, identity and ability to share artistic expressions of lived experience, bringing local, interstate and international artists to venues across Melbourne and regional Victoria.

The 2026 Midsumma Festival featured 226 events, from the Pride March and Carnival through to the final celebration, Victoria’s Pride street party. Centred on the theme “Time and Place”, it spoke to the challenges facing the world and the need to connect through shared humanity, and gave the queer community many ways to share feelings and stories across Melbourne and Greater Victoria.

The theme was an invitation to consider where we’ve come from, where we stand, and where we’re brave enough to go next. Time spoke to urgency and history, the hard-won progress of LGBTQIA+ communities and the responsibility to protect and extend it. Place spoke to the lands on which we meet, First Peoples’ enduring custodianship, and the physical spaces we reclaim as sites of safety, creative expression and togetherness.

Zilla & Brook has been Midsumma’s lead publicist since 2022. For the 2026 Festival, the campaign reached every major television news channel, metro and regional newspapers, community radio and niche queer media, along with substantial online coverage with 634 pieces of coverage, and a publicity value of over $14 million.

Midsumma 2027 runs from 17 January to 7 February under the theme Shifting Sands, a celebration of the many forces and identities shaping queer life across Australia, Asia and the South Pacific.