Vivid Sydney, the New South Wales government’s winter festival of light, music and ideas, opened its 16th edition on Friday evening and will run through Saturday, June 13. The opening lighting of the Sydney Opera House sails drew tens of thousands of spectators to Circular Quay and the surrounding waterfront, and Destination NSW estimated overall attendance for the weekend at more than 1.4 million people.
This year’s programme contains 200 individual events spread across four curated strands — Light, Music, Ideas and Food — and is the first edition in the festival’s history to dispense with an overarching artistic theme. Festival director Gill Minervini said the change reflected feedback that prior themes had become too narrow for the scale Vivid now operates at.
Light installations stretch across the CBD into Barangaroo, Walsh Bay and Darling Harbour, with an extended programme this year along the Goods Line in Ultimo. The headline music programme includes a Royal Hall residency by the contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly and a Cockatoo Island concert series curated by the Indigenous-led collective Baker Boy & Friends.
Destination NSW projects that Vivid will generate around 320 million Australian dollars in visitor spending across the run, slightly above last year’s figure and a record for the festival. Hotel occupancy in central Sydney is forecast above 92 per cent across the opening fortnight, with airport arrivals up an estimated 4 per cent year on year.
The festival has been a touchpoint for debate over policing of large CBD events after a series of pickpocketing operations were broken up during the 2025 edition. NSW Police said this year’s deployment includes 40 per cent more uniformed officers across the Friday and Saturday peak nights and a dedicated mobile patrol around major light installations until the small hours.
For first-time visitors, festival organisers have recommended starting at the Royal Botanic Gardens, where the largest single light installation — a 600-metre walk-through commissioned from the Melbourne studio ENESS — has drawn the longest queues. The installation will rotate its programming nightly through the festival’s closing weekend.