The ZEG International Storytelling Festival has successfully concluded, bringing together more than 1,000 participants and over 140 speakers from across the globe. Held with the longstanding support of TBC Concept, the festival once again transformed Tbilisi into an international platform for dialogue, ideas, and storytelling.
Over the course of three days, six stages hosted masterclasses, workshops, panel discussions, and keynote sessions exploring some of today’s most pressing global issues. Topics included the future of journalism, women’s rights and gender justice, artificial intelligence and technological power, the legacy of wars and empires, the climate crisis, literature, photography, democratic resilience, architecture, philosophy, digital repression, and more. A number of sessions were also dedicated to current developments in Georgia.
The festival also featured educational city tours, offering participants an opportunity to explore Tbilisi’s Soviet and democratic history, discover its architectural heritage, and gain deeper insight into the country’s recent history and contemporary developments.
This year’s lineup featured internationally renowned speakers, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and one of the leading voices on war and forced displacement; David Belt, entrepreneur and visionary developer who transformed a century-old Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse into New Lab and was named among New York City’s 50 most influential figures in technology; Karen Hao, journalist and author of Empire of AI, whose work challenges conventional thinking about who truly controls the artificial intelligence revolution; Zelda Perkins, former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, whose decade-long campaign against non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) led to significant legislative changes in the United Kingdom; Kumi Naidoo, South African human rights activist who organized school boycotts against apartheid at the age of 15 before going on to lead Greenpeace and Amnesty International; Michael Barenboim, violinist and concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; Leopoldo López, Venezuelan opposition leader who spent years imprisoned under Nicolás Maduro’s regime and later founded a global movement opposing authoritarianism; Bao Nguyen, Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose latest documentary, The Stringer, examines the disputed authorship of one of the Vietnam War’s most iconic photographs; Julie Posetti, leading disinformation researcher and current head of Maria Ressa’s Information Integrity Initiative; Rachel Corp, CEO of ITN, whose career progressed from freelance journalism as a student to leading one of the United Kingdom’s most trusted news organizations; Jake Friedman, creative entrepreneur who founded his own record label at the age of 19 and now works across music, theatre, and film; Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the world’s foremost war correspondents; and Eliza Anyangwe, Emmy-winning Cameroonian journalist specializing in gender and power.
This year, TBC further expanded its involvement by becoming the official supporter of the ZEG Volunteer Program. The partnership is an important part of TBC’s strategy to empower the next generation, creating opportunities for young people to gain international experience, develop professional skills, and actively participate in global conversations.
The ZEG International Storytelling Festival will return to Tbilisi on June 4–6, 2027. Before then, ZEG events will take place in Amsterdam and New York in the autumn of 2026.
