About Pomelo Festival
Pomelo Festival Agency is led by Angela Young and Pete Dunn, combining deep festival experience with senior-level commercial and marketing expertise.
Angela has built and run festivals, worked closely with artists, and researched how festivals function as creative and operational forms.
Pete brings decades of experience launching and positioning products including iPod, iPhone and Apple Music, with a focus on how ideas translate into real-world experiences.
Together, we support festivals with line-ups, programming, flow, audience experience and long-term planning. We focus on how events actually work on the ground, helping organisers make clear decisions and avoid problems that only show up once gates open.
We work flexibly around each event, bringing practical input where it’s needed, strengthening what’s already there, and helping festivals hold together in practice.
Experience, backed by research
The work we undertake at Pomelo is underpinned by Angela's ongoing doctoral research into the role and purpose of British music festivals in the 21st century. Her research explores not simply how festivals are organised, but why they matter to audiences, artists, organisers and the communities that host them.
A significant aspect of this research has been the development of a new definition of the music festival itself. Despite the scale and importance of the festival sector, there is surprisingly little agreement over what distinguishes a festival from other forms of live music event. Angela's work directly addresses this gap by proposing a clear and rigorous definition, providing a framework that could have far-reaching implications for academic research, industry practice and the way festivals are understood and evaluated.
This work also challenges the conventional view of festivals as simply a series of performances or commercial events. Instead, it argues that festivals should be recognised as commercially structured creative art forms, where every element—from programming and site design to audience experience, hospitality, welfare and sustainability—contributes to a single creative vision.
This perspective underpins Pomelo's approach. By combining decades of practical festival experience with ongoing academic research, we help organisers create events that are not only operationally successful, but creatively distinctive, culturally significant and genuinely meaningful for everyone involved.
Our Mission
Pomelo Festival Agency specializes in providing consultancy and programming support for UK festivals. We focus on insight-led assistance to help navigate operational challenges and enhance audience engagement.