by FIlmInk Staff
The Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) has announced its sixth annual Digital Futures Summit – a free, interactive event bringing together leading thinkers from across the screen and audio industries to explore this year’s theme: Regenerate.
Featuring three online sessions on Thursday 25 June 2026, the summit is an opportunity for creative leaders, educators and policymakers in the Australian and international screen and audio industry to come together to anticipate, prepare for and help shape the future of the industry.
This year’s theme, Regenerate, invites participants to rethink the screen and audio industries as living ecosystems – focusing not only on sustainability, but on active restoration, renewal and systemic transformation.
Across a series of thought-provoking sessions, the summit will explore how storytelling, technology and collaboration can contribute to healthier, more connected and more resilient creative systems.
Speakers will include Canadian digital documentary pioneer Katerina Cizek; game developer Naphtali Faulkner; Gamilaraay and Mandandanji creative director Jake Duczynski, and storyteller, strategist, and climate justice advocate Tory Stephens.
AFTRS CEO Dr Nell Greenwood said the 2026 theme reflects a growing urgency and opportunity to reshape the industry for the future.
“Regenerate asks us to think beyond adaptation and resilience, and instead consider how we restore, renew and reimagine our industries as living systems,” she said. “At AFTRS, we believe storytelling has the power not only to reflect the world we live in, but to rethink it. This summit brings together leading voices from across the globe to explore how our creative practices, technologies and ways of working can actively contribute to a more sustainable, inclusive and thriving screen and audio sector.”
AFTRS Head of Research Dr Alejandra Canales said the summit will provide a vital platform for examining the deeper systemic changes shaping the future of creative industries.
“The concept of regeneration invites us to rethink how our industries function – not as isolated sectors, but as interconnected systems shaped by people, place and culture,” she said. “Through this year’s program, we’re bringing together diverse perspectives to explore how we can foster new models of collaboration, strengthen community, and design creative futures that are not only innovative, but regenerative in their social, cultural and ecological impact.”
The 2026 program will feature three sessions exploring key themes:
Session 1: Worldbuilding: restoring collective storytelling, imagining better futures brings together the intentional craft of worldbuilding and the expansive practice of worlding to rethink how futures are imagined – and made. Moving beyond storytelling as representation, it positions narrative as a living system: participatory, emergent, and deeply entangled with the worlds it shapes. Through speculative design, collaborative storytelling, and multidimensional research, the session explores how futures are actively constructed across social, environmental, and cultural dimensions.
Session 2: Ancestral to Artificial Intelligence: Reclaiming human creativity invites a critical and hopeful interrogation of the stories we tell and how they are informed by the technologies we use to tell them. The panel asks how can we move beyond a framing of AI as technological disruption to a tool for amplified imagination? If we place AI in dialogue with ancestral intelligence, and embodied, community-held and historically resilient ways of knowing that have long shaped how stories are told and futures are imagined, can we create a space where machine capability intersects with human creativity, memory and meaning-making?
Session 3: Screen producers’ next era of creative possibility draws on ongoing AFTRS research examining the skills producers can develop to strengthen their position, moving beyond survival towards renewal – restructuring their enterprises, diversifying revenue streams and embedding audience and market intelligence at the core of their strategy. This panel unpacks practical pathways for building sustainable, globally competitive slates of distinctively Australian stories.
Bringing together internationally recognised practitioners, researchers and industry leaders, the summit provides a platform for deep discussion, creative exchange and critical thinking about the future of the screen and audio sector.
As with previous years, the Digital Futures Summit is designed as a shared conversation – a space for testing ideas, challenging assumptions and imagining new possibilities for the industry.
To join Digital Futures Summit, presented online by AFTRS, guests must register for each session they wish to attend. Sessions run from 12pm to 4pm on Thursday 25 June 2026, and registration for all sessions is free. See: Digital Futures Summit 2026
Image: AFTRS Unreal Design Workshop, Fire (2023).
