21 MENA Creatives Join Forces for Seven New Works at Cairo Design Week

Twenty-one creatives from more than 10 nationalities are coming together in seven cross-border teams at Cairo Design Week, with each group asked to create an original work. Many had never met before TheMENAEdit began.

The multidisciplinary exhibition is set to debut at Cairo Design Week 2026, turning the collaboration itself into part of what visitors see. Finished works will appear alongside sketches, research, photographs and material experiments documenting how the teams developed their ideas.

Presented by Creative Dialogues, TheMENAEdit was developed in collaboration with Creative Districts and Design Point Studio, which also curated the initiative.

Creative Dialogues founder Yasmine Vanda says the project grew from questioning why creative projects in the region so often look abroad for expertise that already exists locally.

“Usually, you import talent when you don’t have the talent, but you guys have the talent,” she says.

Vanda sees creative communities across the region operating in separate networks, with too few opportunities to work directly with one another. “We’ve normalized it and we’ve belittled our own value in the process of it,” she says.

TheMENAEdit gives practitioners a reason to exchange ideas, test unfamiliar ways of working and build relationships that can extend beyond the exhibition.

The 21 participants work across design, architecture, urban planning, craft and writing. Vanda worked with Karim El Hayawan and Nehal Leheta of Design Point Studio to assemble the seven teams over approximately two months.

Discipline and experience were part of the equation, alongside personality and compatibility. Each team has an Egyptian lead and two collaborators from elsewhere in the region.

The teams are working under the theme “Unlocking Creative Boundaries: Pushing Practice, Process, and Creative Possibility”.

Each received a product or installation brief, with freedom to decide how their different backgrounds would shape the outcome. Teams could develop a shared design language or allow their individual approaches to remain visible within the same work.

The collaboration also meant navigating unfamiliar working styles.

Vanda, El Hayawan and Leheta stayed closely involved as the projects developed through remote meetings, regular check-ins, research and prototyping.

Participants travelled to Cairo for a cultural visit and returned for a prototyping trip, giving visiting creatives time to experience the city and work directly with its cultural and material resources.

The process has been documented throughout. Each team recorded its development through sketches, photographs, research, material experiments and reflections.

“It’s not just about the product or the outcome. We actually document the design thinking process every month,” Vanda says.

Those records will sit alongside the finished works at Cairo Design Week, giving visitors access to the decisions, experiments and exchanges behind each piece.

TheMENAEdit is set to debut during Cairo Design Week, which runs from November 19 to 28. Its seven works are the first tangible result of a project aiming to make collaboration across the region a more regular part of creative practice.

The 21 creatives will arrive at Cairo Design Week with seven finished works and new collaborators from across the region.