AVA Festival Belfast was founded in 2015, making this its 11th year.
The festival is part of UP! Productions Ltd's portfolio of electronic music events.
AVA Festival started in Belfast in 2015 as a one-day showcase for local electronic music and visual art, founded by Sarah McBriar and run by UP! Productions. It was the first grassroots event of its kind in the city, built by and for Irish artists and promoters, and it has grown into a two-day festival paired with one of the UK and Ireland's most respected music-industry conferences. Since 2022 it has set up on the Titanic Slipways, the same dockside ground where the Titanic was built, drawing around 16,000 people across a weekend at the start of summer. The 2026 edition, its twelfth, lands on 29 to 30 May with KNEECAP, KETTAMA, Honey Dijon and Annie Mac on a first wave of more than 50 acts, about 75 percent of them from Ireland and the UK. The festival's reach goes well beyond Belfast: AVA has run showcases in Mumbai, Amsterdam, London, Manchester and Dublin, and its stage has been broadcast worldwide by Boiler Room every year since 2015, one of that broadcaster's longest festival residencies. The Independent has called it a Cultural Catalyst, and Mixmag has named it one of the world's most exciting electronic festivals.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
AVA has one of the deepest livestream track records of any UK or Irish electronic festival because Boiler Room has broadcast its stage from Belfast every year since the festival launched in 2015. Sessions from 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and the 2024 ten-year anniversary edition are archived for free replay on boilerroom.tv, with many individual sets also posted to Boiler Room's YouTube channel. When the 2020 festival was cancelled, AVA still went online through Boiler Room's Streaming From Isolation series on 30 May 2020, pairing home performances with archive sets to raise money for the Global FoodBanking Network. The streams are free to watch and hosted on Boiler Room's own platform and YouTube rather than behind a paywall.
Founded by Sarah McBriar in 2015 as the first grassroots electronic music and visual arts festival built by and for Irish artists and promoters.
It pairs the festival with a daytime music-industry conference, plus international showcases that have run in Mumbai, Amsterdam, London, Manchester and Dublin.
Roughly 75 percent of the 2026 lineup is built around artists from Ireland and the UK, a deliberate stance on local talent.
Boiler Room has broadcast its stage from AVA every year since 2015, making it one of the broadcaster's longest-running festival residencies.
The festival takes place at Titanic Slipways in UK. It typically hosts crowds in the 16,000+ range across 2 days.
AVA Festival Belfast was founded in 2015, making this its 11th year.
The festival is part of UP! Productions Ltd's portfolio of electronic music events.