How Three Friends Turned a Beirut Café into Wollongong's Most Ambitious Arts Festival

In 2019, Amira Hassan, Tom Chen, and Marcus Wolfe were sitting in Hassan's modest Lebanese café on Keira Street—the kind of place where regulars nursed long blacks and regulars felt like family—when they noticed something troubling. Wollongong's winter months had become culturally dormant. The city's galleries on Crown Street and Bellerine Street sat quiet. Local venues like the Town Hall struggled to fill seats between June and August.

"We weren't complaining," Hassan recalled in a recent conversation. "We were just noticing." What began as informal chatter evolved into late-night planning sessions at the café. By 2020, Chen—a graphic designer who'd relocated from Sydney—had sketched preliminary concepts. Wolfe, then a program manager at Wollongong City Council, began mapping permissions and budgets. Hassan provided the heart: an insistence that the festival celebrate local artists, not fly-in headliners.

Winter Lights Festival launched in 2021 with a modest budget of $140,000 and twelve events across five venues. This year, it's grown to $380,000, 47 events, and partnerships extending from the Illawarra Museum to the Innovation Campus. The June-July program now draws an estimated 18,000 attendees annually.

The creation wasn't seamless. Hassan and Wolfe parted ways amicably in 2023 over artistic direction—a split that, rather than fracturing the festival, distributed its leadership across a broader curatorial team. Chen's design studio expanded to accommodate festival administration. What had been a labor of love from three people became a distributed network of fifteen core organizers and over eighty volunteers.

Walking through the current festival programming reveals their philosophy: intimate venues in working neighbourhoods rather than polished cultural precincts. A video art installation at the Wollongong PCYC. Chamber music in the Thirroul Library. Emerging Indigenous artists exhibited at the Shellcove Community Hall. Tickets remain deliberately affordable—most events cost between $15 and $25, with free community sessions scattered throughout.

"The initial insight was simple," Chen explained via email. "Winter shouldn't feel empty in a city like ours. But the deeper insight came from doing the work: that festivals belong to the people who create them, not the other way around."

This year's Winter Lights runs through July 31 across Wollongong's CBD, coastal suburbs, and inland neighbourhoods. The festival's success has sparked interest from councils in Newcastle and Adelaide exploring similar models—testament to what three people drinking coffee and genuinely listening to their city could catalyze.

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