Sarah McBriar

Sarah McBriar is the Founder & Creative Director of AVA & UP Productions, specialising in large-scale festival and conference creation, production design and programming across the audio, visual arts (AVA) sector.

AVA is an Audio Visual Arts Festival, Conference & Event series that celebrates, amplifies and develops electronic music, visual art and immersive technology. Since 2015, AVA has hosted hundreds of events and festivals, streamed to over 25 million people worldwide and nurtured thousands of artists through their conferences & creator forum, now London’s leading Electronic Music Conference. AVA has been described by The Independent as ‘A cultural catalyst’, and ‘One of the world’s most exciting electronic festivals’ by Mixmag.

With over 12 years’ experience across the live entertainment, events and cultural sector, Sarah focuses on concept creation, production design, producing and fundraising for the development of the Festival, Conference, IMMERSE - a new 360 touring stage and PAIRED - a new Food & Music pairing event held at the Tate Modern London.

Between 2012-2015, she pioneered a large-scale tourism development project for Manchester City FC, worked with Block 9 at Glastonbury, the Manchester International Festival and Greater Manchester’s club series, the Warehouse Project. In 2020, Sarah became one of 16 newly appointed Creative Entrepreneur Experts at the Säid Business School, University of Oxford, where she mentors MBA students and small businesses.

When she isn't deep in cultural pursuits, Sarah enjoys surfing, dancing, cooking and being in nature whenever possible.