Runway AI Festival opens submissions
The Runway AI Festival announced June events in New York and Los Angeles and is taking submissions through April 20 — it’s positioned as a showcase for AI‑driven fashion, film, and design work. That calendar item matters if you’re tracking where tech and style are converging this year. (x.com)
Runway is no longer treating artificial intelligence as just a movie tool. Its 2026 festival is taking submissions until April 20 at 4:59 p.m. Eastern time, and the categories now include film, fashion, design, advertising, gaming, and new media. (runwayml.com) The live events are set for June 11 in New York and June 18 in Los Angeles. On the festival site, Runway calls this its fourth annual event and says the program has expanded from an artificial intelligence film festival into a broader creative showcase. (runwayml.com) That shift is the story. Runway started the festival in 2022 with a film focus, and the 2026 edition is the first one branded simply as “AI Festival” instead of “AI Film Festival.” (runwayml.com) The submission page shows how wide the net now is. Film entries must run 3 to 15 minutes, while the overall prize pool is listed at more than $135,000 across all tracks. (runwayml.com) Runway is the same company pushing hard into artificial intelligence video tools for creators. Its own news page has spent the past year announcing deals with Lionsgate, AMC Networks, Getty Images, Parsons School of Design, and New York University Tisch, which shows how aggressively it is moving into both entertainment and design institutions. (runwayml.com) The festival’s new shape lines up with that strategy. A Deadline report in January said Runway was widening the event beyond film and quoted the company describing it as “an interdisciplinary celebration” at the frontier of art and technology. (deadline.com) Last year’s edition was still centered on short films, with screenings at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York and The Broad Stage in Los Angeles. This year the company is using the same two-city format, but the categories now pull in fashion and design people who would not have fit the old rules. (runwayml.com) That makes the deadline less like a niche film-festival date and more like a checkpoint for a whole slice of creative work. If you want to see where artificial intelligence-made images, videos, garments, campaigns, and interactive projects are being packaged for the mainstream in June 2026, this is one of the clearest places to watch. (runwayml.com)
