Digital Storytelling Festival 2022 - here’s everything you need to know to join in

About the Digital Storytelling Festival 

This May and June, Europeana and The Heritage Lab bring you the second Digital Storytelling Festival! This international creative content brings people and cultural heritage together, encouraging everyone to create and share stories with openly licensed digital heritage. 

This year, the Festival kicks off with our Opening Gala on 10-11 May, which is free to attend and includes interactive workshops and inspiring stories and storytellers from across the globe - you won’t want to miss it. 

UPDATE: July 2022

The Digital Storytelling Festival Opening Gala 2022  is over and is now available to watch online. Enjoy!

What can you do at the Opening Gala? 

Hone your creative skills. Take part in workshops on creative writing, GIF-making, and Mediveal meme-making, and put our ‘7 digital storytelling tips’ into action. Medhavi Gandhi and Doug McCarthy’s guided tour of their favourite online resources will give you plenty of content to work with.

Hear from expert storytellers. Thomas Böhm & Goethe Institute share ‘Time to Listen’, a collection of stories from all genres of art, from all over the world. Storytellers from KU Leuven tell us how and why they created a digital exhibition about ‘The Pill’. And find out how art, storytelling and education go hand in hand at the Hunt Museum and the Slovak National Gallery. 

Discover exciting organisations to follow. Find out how DailyArt Magazine, Splainer and Curationist use storytelling to engage their audiences. 

And a ‘Pecha-Kucha’ session will present a multitude of lightning talks to inspire and motivate! 

Following the Opening Gala, we’ll open up the contest - there’ll be prizes for the best stories, as voted by Festival goers and a professional jury. 

This year, we want to provide an opportunity for young people to showcase their skills and tell the stories that matter to them. So, to support the European Year of Youth, we have dedicated prizes for young people aged up to 25 in both the creative editorial and social media categories. 

Be inspired by last year’s winners

If you joined last year’s Festival, you already know that it featured incredible stories from around the world. We’ll be talking to some of the winners during the Opening Gala. 

Carola Carlino’s ‘Story of cats who became mummies’ won the People’s Choice Award, using a text-based story interwoven with interactive images to take us on a journey to the ‘golden sandy lands of ancient Egypt’ in the first century BC and the rituals around the mummification of animals - and particularly cats.

Nick J Cave entertained and impressed in the Social Media category by animating a series of images from the 1860s using GIFs. Nick took a series of pictures showing changing states, like a man becoming a butterfly and animated them. ‘I think the results really bring to life the subtle changes between each picture as they loop continuously, moving from one state to another’, Nick told us. 

And in the creative editorial category, Arunesh Varede used an animated short film, along with text and images, to tell the story of ‘A day in the life of a Bhisti’, who is more or less, ‘a water carrier from paradise who brings relief to the thirsty’. Arunesh writes that, ‘I took this opportunity to bring alive some of the long lost aspects of India, the country I live in. Digital realms are a perfect place to preserve moments that have faded with time, so that we can continue to share these stories in the times to come.’

Ready to get started? 

Interested in taking part? Here’s how you can get started.

1. Register for the Opening Gala - join us for inspiration, hints and tips, and interactive practical workshops.

2. Check out the storytelling resources from last year’s Digital Storytelling Festival on Medium, including best practices, tips for telling stories via GIFs and ‘Instagram-style’ stories, as well as a range of online tools to help you create your stories using anything from graphics to voiceovers. 

3. Explore Europeana’s seven tips for digital storytelling and watch our webinar on ‘Storytelling with digital culture’.

4. Follow #DigiStoryFest on Twitter and subscribe to the Festival’s newsletter to keep up-to-date.