Joy Awards 2026 Lavender Carpet

Project overview

The Joy Awards 2026 Lavender Carpet transformed the exterior of Riyadh’s ANB Arena into a vast, immersive arrival experience for one of the region’s most high-profile entertainment events.

Held on 17 January 2026, the sixth edition of the Joy Awards brought together major stars from Hollywood, Bollywood, K-drama and the Arab entertainment world for a night celebrating music, cinema, television, sport and cultural achievement. Before guests reached the main awards ceremony, the Lavender Carpet created its own spectacular pre-show environment — part celebrity arrival, part architectural journey, part live performance stage.

Lighting design approach

Ross Williams designed the Lavender Carpet lighting for the second year running, creating a large-scale exterior lighting design that wrapped around three sides of the host venue. The design incorporated hundreds of fixtures at both ground and rooftop level, turning the ANB Arena into a beacon visible from miles around and giving the arrival route the scale and impact expected of a major international broadcast event.

Working with lighting programmer Rob Bradley, and with additional performance programming by Russell Grubiak, Ross’s design had to support multiple overlapping requirements. The carpet needed to look elegant and luxurious for arriving guests, deliver strong and consistent broadcast coverage for media positions, integrate with large-scale video and scenic elements, and still have the power to shift into full performance mode when required.

Guest journey and performance environment

The Lavender Carpet experience was conceived as a choreographed guest journey. Arrivals moved through a sequence of architectural and digital environments, including a dramatic video tunnel, an enchanted-forest visual world, formal garden-inspired structures, a marbled rotunda stage, suspended orchids, reflective water features and an international stage set within a shallow pool. The lighting had to bind these elements together while allowing each moment to retain its own visual identity.

A major highlight of the evening was Katy Perry’s Lavender Carpet performance, complete with dancers, drones and full-scale show lighting. This demanded a different gear from the carpet’s normal arrival language: sharper cueing, more intensity, performance-led looks and the precision needed to support a global pop artist in an outdoor broadcast environment. The lighting had to move seamlessly from glamorous architectural ambience into a high-impact entertainment moment, then return to supporting the flow of celebrity arrivals and media coverage.

Technical challenges

The scale of the exterior design brought its own technical challenges. With lighting positions spread across ground-level structures, scenic elements and rooftop locations, the system needed to cover a huge footprint while remaining controlled, balanced and camera-friendly. Every area had to work for live guests, photographers, broadcast cameras and long-distance exterior views, with the whole venue reading as one coherent visual statement.

For Ross, the Lavender Carpet was not simply an entrance route. It was a complete exterior show environment: architectural, theatrical, televisual and performative. The result was a bold, polished and highly visible lighting design that helped establish the Joy Awards 2026 arrival experience as one of the event’s defining images.