Our events programme
We run a variety of events across the year to serve our members. Our aim is to ensure every event is beneficial and serves the creative community.
Watch our past events here and find out more about the events we run below. Past talks available to watch include self-publishing and freelance arts, dismantling obstacles to accessibility, creatives in an era of climate emergency, and tax returns are changing, are you ready?
If you have been to any of our events in the past few months, please help us improve how we run them by submitting your feedback here.
Creative Circles
Creative Circles is Creative Edinburgh’s flagship event. Taking place every month, it provides a relaxed, casual atmosphere for creatives and students to connect, share ideas and advice, meet potential collaborators, and find out what’s on in the city. Join us on your break from work, share ideas and advice, make new connections, and find your next collaborator.
Creative Edinburgh Awards
Since 2012, we've been celebrating the city's creative community at our annual Creative Edinburgh Awards, highlighting the projects, people and places that flourish across Edinburgh and continually ensuring its place on the cultural map, nationally and internationally.
Combined with our Birthday Bash, every Autumn we get together to don the dancing shoes, raise a glass and cheer on our fellow creatives.
Creative Sectors
Creative Sectors is a new series of events to help build connections between Edinburgh’s creative community, organisations and venues based in the city. A partnership between Creative Edinburgh and Business Gateway, we want to bridge divides and boost a stronger network of freelancers and businesses.
Creatives with Children
This event is designed to give parents a more flexible space to network, with their children in tow. It’s also a space for parents or guardians to share and workshop some of the specific challenges that come with freelancing and parenting.
FutureGaze
FutureGaze is a lunchtime series brought to you by Creative Edinburgh, providing time out to reflect and gaze into the future of the creative industries.
In conversation with Caroline Parkinson, we welcome creative leaders who have innovated and led significant changes in their creative business, artistic or academic practice over the past year to share what the future looks like for them - and for the creative and cultural sector.
The history of FutureGaze: what we've learned
Raise Your Game
The digital skills programme that focuses on upskilling creative freelancers on digital tools, data and future-proof business models. This course has been developed to provide you with practical guidance and digital skills to support your personal and professional development as you plan for the next step in your career.
Broken down into three key chapters - Taking Stock. Making Moves. Thinking Forward - Raise Your Game will support you to refocus your career goals, refine your methods and harness the knowledge you need to achieve them.
Roundtable
The series aims to create a space to gather around the ‘freelance table’ and discuss challenges faced by creatives and offer a chance to share thoughts, ideas and recommendations. Future topics will include fair work and inclusion.
Surgery
Creative Edinburgh's surgeries advise on core questions for freelancers and small businesses. Tackling topics such as financial management, VAT, legal structures, funding application writing, and more.
Summer Party
Every summer we get the creatives in the city together with a rooftop bar, free drinks, pizza and music.
As freelancers, we often miss out on office parties, so here is an opportunity to mingle and make meaningful connections with new friends in the industry.
Talking Heads
Since launching in Spring 2020, Connected Innovators has funded close to 40 emerging leaders in the creative industries, allowing for time to conduct research & development into new approaches to their work via data and data-driven technologies.
As their projects near the end of their funding, Talking Heads: Connect + Innovate invites them to promote the work that has taken place, skills and collaborations gained and their plans for the future!