Natasha Carella and her Vision behind Dubai Design Week

Natasha Carella, Director of Dubai Design Week, stands at the forefront of the Middle East’s growing creative landscape. As the festival’s director, she shapes a multidisciplinary platform that connects regional innovation with international design dialogue. Under her direction, Dubai Design Week has evolved into a global meeting point for architects, makers, emerging designers, and thinkers, redefining how the region engages with contemporary design. Before joining the festival, Carella held key roles at Art Dubai and the Jagtiani Foundation, where she looked after philanthropic initiatives and cultural partnerships across the SWANA region.

The 11th edition of Dubai Design Week, took place 4–9 November 2025, and lived up to the promise of being its most ambitious yet. Presented under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairperson of Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) and in strategic partnership with Dubai Design District (d3) and supported by Dubai Culture, this year’s edition featured over 1,000 designers and creative practitioner, spotlighting design as a civic force—bridging heritage, innovation, and sustainability through installations, commissions, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Carella sits down with hube’s editor-in-chief, Sasha Kovaleva, to reflect on the role of design in shaping culture, community, and change.

SK: Dubai’s art scene is rapidly gaining recognition on the global stage. How do you see the city reconciling its deep-rooted cultural history with the drive to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary practice?

NC: Dubai’s strength lies precisely in that tension. It is a young, future facing city, but that does not have to sit in contrast with heritage. In fact, what has become increasingly exciting is the way contemporary practice across the UAE and the Gulf is being informed by histories of making, building and living that were shaped by climate, material constraint and collective life. These references are not being treated as nostalgia or aesthetic garnish. They are being approached as knowledge, and in many cases as solutions.

Across architecture, product, interiors and graphic design, practitioners are drawing from vernacular intelligence to rethink how things are made, how spaces are organised and how identities are expressed. Techniques using mud, reed, palm fronds or earth based construction were never ornamental gestures. They were practical systems of care and resourcefulness, developed out of necessity long before sustainability became a design agenda. What we are seeing now is not a rediscovery, but a renewed recognition, and a rebalancing after decades in which many contemporary frameworks were dominated by imported references.

At Dubai Design Week, we try to create space for that dialogue to be visible and to move forward. One example is A Present Absent Mudhif, commissioned as part of Abwab in 2024, which reinterpreted the traditional reed guesthouses of the Marsh Arabs. While rooted in Iraqi geography and cultural memory, it also pointed towards contemporary possibilities for lightweight, low impact and regenerative architecture, especially relevant to contexts of ecological fragility and displacement. This is where heritage becomes active rather than historic, offering forms and methods that can be translated into present needs.

The other layer is Dubai’s unique social makeup. Over 200 nationalities live and work here, and that cultural overlap creates a constant exchange of ideas, disciplines and aesthetics. It produces unexpected collaborations and new hybrids, where craft lineages, contemporary technologies and different ways of seeing the world intersect. That is why the city can feel simultaneously grounded and experimental, and why the outputs often resist easy categorisation.