CIVILIZATION // HELD / WITHHELD

Opening talk by Christopher Hibma.
Christopher Hibma is a cultural leader, systems thinker and builder of creative ecosystems. He currently serves at HB Studio while holding several international governance and advisory roles. He is Founding Chair of Zoukak Theatre in Beirut, a Creative Ambassador for Under the Radar Festival, an Advisory Board member for Catapult Opera and a 2026 Fellow at Salzburg Global. He founded The Enclave to advance reciprocal philanthropy and to connect artists with spaces designed for sustained thought, research and creation.

Across more than two decades, Christopher has built programs, residencies and long-term partnerships with institutions including Sundance Institute, Ettijahat–Independent Culture in Lebanon/Syria, LUMA Foundation in France, Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival in Egypt, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and Addis Ababa University. Throughout, he has focused on expanding access, supporting artists whose voices reshape the field and linking cultural production to civic imagination.

His writing on the creative economy interrogates how the infrastructures that support art often reproduce scarcity and extraction, and he offers alternative models rooted in abundance, equity, shared power and reciprocity rather than competition and preservation. He advocates for systems that mirror nature’s cycles of renewal and position creativity as central to economic life, not peripheral to it. As Director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, Christopher helped build one of the world’s most internationally connected artist communities and launched multi-regional residencies that supported new work across disciplines. His leadership strengthened global pathways for collaboration, mentorship and exchange.