Meet the Creatives Behind the Creative Industry Summit

From its humble beginnings as a small gathering of creatives in a little-known cultural center to one of the region’s biggest and most impactful conferences, the stellar rise of the Creative Industry Summit is just one of the many successes Mai Salama and Neamat Khalil have notched over decades of experience in the events industry.  

The Creative Industry Summit brand may have become a beacon for those working in the creative economy but it is however just one of the many powerful experiential and educational platforms the ambitious duo - who also happen to be cousins - have curated and crafted. Together they brought the 26th Annual Women Economic Forum to Egypt in early March 20th, a unique gathering of diplomatic power made even more challenging on the precipice of the pandemic. They pulled it off with aplomb while pulling the world’s gaze towards Egypt.  

In 2017 they became the official Egypt office of the iconic Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity before co-founding the Nu Digital Awards, the first awards of its kind aimed at celebrating the MENA Region’s creative excellence. Terry Savage, the former Chairman of Cannes Lion is one of the Nu Awards’ stellar stakeholders alongside regional creative gurus Ali Shabaan and Abdelhamid Abdella (co-founders at Icon Creations).  

And all of this is just the shiny front-facing aspect of the work. Behind the scenes, Khalil and Salama run ‘The Worx’, one of the region’s most industrious events consultancy and management companies with a client roster that reads like a who’s who of global brands.   Ahead of this year’s Creative Industry Summit, taking place between the 27th and 29th of September at Cairo Business Park, and set to be the biggest and most innovative edition of the conference so far, we sat down with the powerful pair to find out more about their journey, their dynamic and their big plans to position Egypt and the region as a global hub for creativity.