NZ Fringe has spent the last 36 years building a reputation for being a bold, brave and innovative arts festival.
It’s different to other curated arts festivals in that it is “open-access” which means that anyone can register an event, with no gate-keeping. This allows for a bold, creative energy to permeate the festival with a huge diversity of events on offer. One of the best things about NZ Fringe is that audiences are able to witness the birth of “the next big thing”—it really is the Birthplace of Brilliance. You’ll see events you loved, events that moved or challenged you and events that are so creative that they’re impossible to describe (those are the best!).
NZ Fringe, also known at times as the Wellington Fringe or just FRINGE!, started in 1990 when a group of performance makers came home from a trip to the mighty Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland and loudly proclaimed “we need some of that too!”. With the help of the NZ Festival (then known as The New Zealand International Festival of the Arts) Fringe was born as a one-week festival within a festival, in its ideal home: BATS Theatre. The festival quickly grew from there and established itself as a key player in the Aotearoa arts ecosystem, not just for its role as a launchpad for artists’ careers, but also for Wellington’s culture-loving audiences! It’s pretty remarkable that since the 1990s, NZ Fringe has evolved and grown to the scale it is now, with hundreds of events making it the largest open-access multidisciplinary arts festival in Aotearoa. Tu meke!
NZ Fringe is run by the not-for-profit Creative Capital Arts Trust, who also bring Pōneke audiences the free street arts festival, CubaDupa. We rely heavily on our wonderful sponsors and funding partners who support us to keep bringing creative magic to Wellington every year.
Our small team is exhilarated to have delivered another fantastic season, check out some highlights below from last season:
- A total of 170 Productions held a massive 590 performances over the festival’s three-week season.
- With 764 artists from around the world and work spanning a wide variety of genres, there was a hugely diverse selection of events that lit up the city with talent.
- 40 performance spaces took part in bringing NZ Fringe to Pōneke audiences and enabled artists to present their work all across the city.
- The 2026 festival brought in a huge array of talent as well as 20,572 tickets sold, with 23 free productions.
- Over $390,000 in ticket sales plus $91,000 in funding direct to artists!
- Friday, February 20th saw the best daily ticket sales in the 36-year history of NZ Fringe—over $19,000!
- 758 “Ticket +” ticket types were sold, for an additional $5,550 worth of revenue going directly to artists, donated by audiences.
- 577 hours of volunteer work was contributed by dozens of volunteers.
