As a City of Media Arts, York is a meeting point for ideas and creativity. Illuminating York was established in 2005 as an annual festival designed, through the creative use and celebration of light, to reveal the City of York in new ways. It is a significant event in the cultural life of the city; this year it will take place over four nights and days, from 28th to 31st October and is again projected to attract an audience of over 50,000 people. For 2015, a new approach to devising the festival’s programme has been adopted with the appointment of curators’ Hazel Colquhoun and Andrew Knight, responsible for researching and directing the artistic programme. With support and advice from the festival’s Steering Group, they will shape the programme’s content which will include new, ‘site specific’ commissions as well as the presentation of existing artists’ work not previously seen in York. This year the festival aims to celebrate the transformative power of light in all its forms, from natural to artificially generated light, to broker new relationships between people and the fabric of the city - to reveal York and enable people to experience it in new ways and to contribute to UNESCO’s International Year of Light and engage with the City of Media Arts.