In February, more than a billion people watched the Winter Olympics open across four locations in Milan and the Alps at once. In March, Hollywood's most famous night ended, as it has for decades, at a ball produced by the same woman who has run it since the 1990s. In May, the Met Gala turned a museum staircase into the most photographed set on earth. Somebody planned all of it. This list is about those somebodies.
The 50 people here produce the events the rest of the world watches: Olympic ceremonies, award-show galas, Super Bowl halftimes, fashion spectacles, presidential celebrations, and the parties that define entire cultural seasons. Some run firms with 700 employees. Some work with a small team and an impossible client list. What unites them is simple. When an event cannot fail, when the whole world is watching or the client is the most demanding person alive, these are the names on the call sheet.
Here are the 50 best event planners, designers, and producers working in 2026.
The Icons
1. Colin Cowie
Forty years into his career, Colin Cowie remains the name most people reach for first. He built his reputation producing celebrations for Oprah Winfrey, and the client list grew from there: Jennifer Lopez, Fortune 500 companies, royalty, and hotels and casinos that hire him to design the entire guest experience. His standard is famous. Every sense gets considered, every moment gets produced, and nothing is left to chance from the lighting to the temperature of the plates. Eight books carry his approach, and his events out of New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas still set the bar the industry measures itself against.
2. Preston Bailey
Preston Bailey turns flowers into architecture. Over thirty years, the New York designer has become the most famous name in event transformation, building ceilings of blooms, life-size floral animals, and rooms remade entirely in petals for royalty, CEOs, and celebrities. His floral work at the 2024 Ambani celebration in India was seen around the world, and his six books have carried his ideas far beyond the clients who can afford him. Plenty of designers decorate a space. Bailey replaces it with a new one.
3. Marco Balich
No one alive has produced more of the planet's biggest moments than Marco Balich. The Milan-based chairman of Balich Wonder Studio has 16 Olympic ceremonies to his name along with the Qatar 2022 World Cup ceremonies, and this February he served as creative director of the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic opening, the first in history staged across four locations at once. His work reaches audiences in the billions, a scale no one else on this list touches. For the people who produce nations' proudest evenings, Balich is the standard.
4. Bronson van Wyck
Bronson van Wyck has produced events for three American presidents, Beyonce, Madonna, and the houses of Chanel and Hermes, and along the way became the most press-celebrated society producer of his generation. His New York firm handles everything from museum openings to political spectacle, always with a point of view: parties, he has long argued, are how people mark what matters to them. His book, Born to Party, Forced to Work, made the case in print. Vogue once called him the Wizard of Oz of party planning, and the description has stuck for a reason.
5. David Stark
When New York's great institutions want an event that doubles as a work of art, they call David Stark. His Brooklyn studio has produced design-forward events for MoMA, the Whitney, Carnegie Hall, Target, and Louis Vuitton, built on a signature idea: ordinary materials, used at extraordinary scale, become unforgettable rooms. BizBash profiled him again in 2025 as one of the industry's most influential figures, and his benefit work, including the 2025 Robin Hood gala, keeps proving that corporate and cultural events can be genuinely inventive rather than merely expensive.
6. Mindy Weiss
Mindy Weiss appears on our wedding list too, but limiting her to weddings undersells the operation. Her Beverly Hills firm produces celebrity celebrations of every kind, baby showers that draw paparazzi, milestone birthdays for the Kardashian-Jenner family, and product launches for brands that want their event covered like entertainment news. Three decades in, she remains the planner celebrities trust with the moments they actually care about, and her warmth with clients is as much a part of her reputation as the events themselves.
7. Cheryl Cecchetto
Every year after the Academy Awards, the winners walk into a ball that Cheryl Cecchetto has spent months building. Her firm, Sequoia Productions, has produced the Oscars Governors Ball for more than three decades, along with the Emmys Governors Gala, which makes her the person Hollywood trusts with its two most important official parties. The 2025 editions alone hosted thousands of the industry's most famous faces. It is one of the most remarkable runs in event production, and it has made her the quiet institution behind Hollywood's biggest nights.
8. Bryan Rafanelli
Bryan Rafanelli produced Chelsea Clinton's wedding and events for the Obama White House, which tells you the level of scrutiny his work is built to survive. His Boston and New York firm has staged more than 2,000 events across 50 cities, from state-level occasions to major nonprofit galas for organizations like the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The design is elegant, but the discipline is the signature. When the guest list includes presidents, nothing gets left to luck.
9. David Monn
David Monn designs the evenings that New York's cultural establishment considers sacred: the Met Costume Institute Gala, galas for the Guggenheim and the New York Public Library, and a White House State Dinner. He is famous for total control of detail, down to commissioning scents for a room, and his book The Art of Celebrating documents a career built on the belief that beauty is in the specifics. For blue-chip institutions with reputations to protect, Monn has been the answer for twenty years.
10. Raul Avila
The Met Gala is the most photographed party on earth, and every year since 2007, Raul Avila has designed it. The Colombian-born New York designer trained under the legendary Robert Isabell and then quietly became indispensable to fashion's biggest night, transforming the Metropolitan Museum's Great Hall into a new world each May. Nearly two decades of that single credit would be enough for this list. The rest of his portfolio, from galas to brand installations, is the bonus.
11. Sharon Sacks
Sharon Sacks produces celebrity events the way studios produce films: large crews, precise schedules, and reveals timed to the minute. Her Calabasas firm has handled celebrations for entertainment's biggest names, philanthropic galas, and events for two American presidents, and she entered the BizBash Southern California Hall of Fame in 2017. Entertainment television has spent years pointing cameras at her work. Few producers alive have run more high-profile events, and the calm of her rooms is the tell.
12. David Tutera
David Tutera brought event planning into America's living rooms. My Fair Wedding made him the most famous planner on television, and his production career runs well beyond it: celebrity celebrations, official post-Grammy parties, and events for names like Elton John and Barbara Walters. Seven books extended the brand. Whatever purists think of TV fame, Tutera has introduced more people to this profession than anyone else alive, and the polish of his productions is real.
13. Marcy Blum
Marcy Blum has spent 35 years as one of New York's defining event planners, trusted by families like the Rockefellers and celebrities who want their milestones handled with taste and wit. She trained in kitchens before she ever planned a party, and it shows in events where the food is never an afterthought. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar have named her among the world's best for years. In a field full of yes-people, Blum is famous for telling clients the truth, which is a large part of why they stay.
14. Jung Lee
Jung Lee's events are exercises in precision. The co-founder of Fete in New York has spent two decades producing modern, architectural celebrations that have earned repeated best-in-the-world recognition from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and her design work has reached the White House, where she contributed to a State Dinner. She also founded the luxury registry Slowdance. Her rooms share one quality: stand in them, and you can tell every decision was made on purpose.
Spectacle, Ceremonies, and Brand
15. Cara Kleinhaut
In 2025, BizBash gave Cara Kleinhaut its Lifetime Achievement Award, recognition for two decades building AGENC into one of the country's leading brand-experience agencies. From Los Angeles and New York, her team produces experiential campaigns for Dior, Amazon, Goop, and Paramount, the kind of work where an event is also a piece of marketing seen by millions. She has been ahead of that shift the whole time, which is exactly what the award was for.
16. Thierry Reboul
The Paris 2024 opening ceremony did what no Olympics had ever done: it left the stadium. Boats carried the athletes down the Seine through the heart of the city, and the man who conceived that evening was Thierry Reboul, the Games' executive director of ceremonies and a career event-maker who founded the agency Ubi Bene. France asked him back to reinvent the 2025 Bastille Day festivities. His specialty is the idea nobody thought was allowed.
17. Scott Givens
Scott Givens has produced ceremonies at 15 Olympic Games and 63 global ceremonies in all, earning the Olympic Order along the way. Now comes the biggest assignment in American event production: LA28 named his firm FiveCurrents, in a joint venture with Fulwell, as executive producer of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies. The opening of an American Olympics is a once-in-a-generation production, and Givens is the person entrusted with it.
18. Baz Halpin
If you have seen a show at the Las Vegas Sphere, you have probably seen Baz Halpin's work. His company Silent House produced the Eagles' residency and the Backstreet Boys' Into the Millennium show at the venue, and his resume runs through Usher's Super Bowl LVIII halftime and production design for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, the highest-grossing tour ever staged. TAIT acquired Silent House in early 2026, a bet on exactly this kind of technology-driven spectacle. Halpin is where concerts, sport, and event production converge.
19. David Beahm
David Beahm became famous overnight in 2001 when he designed Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas' wedding, then spent the next two decades proving it was no fluke. His New York studio produces about 200 events a year, from luxury brand work for Dior and Louis Vuitton to celebrations across the world. His floral-driven style is lush without being loud, and his longevity at volume is nearly unmatched in the city.
20. Tony Schubert
Awards season runs through Tony Schubert. His firm Event Eleven has produced parties and activations around the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, and Super Bowl, the highest-pressure party calendar in entertainment, and BizBash named him an Industry Innovator in 2026. Studios and networks hire him because his events photograph like sets, which is no accident. Schubert builds rooms designed to be seen by people who see everything.
21. Etienne Russo
Etienne Russo has produced more than a thousand runway shows, which means he has shaped how the world sees Chanel, Hermes, Dries Van Noten, and Moncler. His Brussels-based firm Villa Eugenie treats a twelve-minute fashion show as total theater, and designers trust him with the moment their year depends on. He produced every Dries Van Noten show through the designer's emotional 2024 farewell. Fashion has runway spectacle largely because Russo kept raising the bar for it.
22. Jesse Collins
The Super Bowl halftime show is the most-watched live entertainment on earth, and Jesse Collins executive produces it: Kendrick Lamar in 2025, Bad Bunny in 2026, with an Emmy already on the shelf for a previous edition. His company also produces the Emmys telecast and the Grammys. He is the most television-adjacent name on this list, a broadcast producer more than a planner, and he is here because thirteen minutes of his work draws a bigger audience than every other event on this page combined.
23. JB Miller
For thirty years, JB Miller's Empire Entertainment has been the firm institutions call when the room will hold heads of state. The TIME 100 Gala, White House and UN General Assembly receptions, the Webby Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival events all run through his New York and Tokyo offices, and he has an Emmy to his name. His specialty is a specific kind of pressure: events where the guest list is the story, and any mistake becomes news.
24. Shai Tertner
Shai Tertner built Shiraz Creative into a coast-to-coast experiential firm with clients like Google, Gucci, and Beyonce, producing brand events that need both celebrity polish and marketing results. From New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, his team handles everything from intimate VIP dinners to full-scale activations. He earned his spot on BizBash's top-designer roster by making branded events feel like genuine occasions rather than advertising.
25. Stanlee Gatti
San Francisco's great occasions have run through Stanlee Gatti for decades. The city's premier society designer handles its civic galas, cultural benefits, and most important private celebrations, with a floral studio producing at a pace few competitors could survive. He is the rare designer who is himself a civic institution, and Northern California's social calendar would look different without him.
26. Brett Hyman
Brett Hyman started NVE Experience Agency from a college nightlife hustle and built it into one of America's defining brand-experience companies. The 2025 client roster tells the story: Google, FIFA, Jaguar, NBC Sports, and Pinterest joined a history that includes Apple, Amazon, and PlayStation, and the firm expanded to London the same year. Premium brands hire NVE when the event has to feel like culture rather than marketing, which is the hardest trick in the business.
27. Rishi Patel
Rishi Patel leads HMR Designs, Chicago's premier full-service design and fabrication house, where the sets, florals, and installations are built in-house at a scale most firms outsource. The firm's portfolio spans the city's biggest social events and corporate work, with reported clients as notable as President Obama. BizBash put him on its 40 Under 40 list, and under his leadership HMR has stayed the standard for Midwestern grandeur.
28. Tony Conway
Tony Conway's Legendary Events is Atlanta's full-service powerhouse, an operation spanning catering, floral, and event production that has served Tyler Perry, Elton John, and Oprah. His career honors include the Special Event Lifetime Achievement award and a place in the industry's Hall of Fame. Conway represents something this list needs more of: the South's event industry at full scale, built over decades of consistent excellence.
29. Kristin Banta
Kristin Banta's events refuse to behave. The Los Angeles designer is known for conceptual, boundary-pushing luxury, and the industry keeps rewarding her for it: the Gala Awards named her Event Designer of the Year in both 2023 and 2026. Her women- and LGBTQ+-owned firm handles weddings, galas, and premieres for clients who specifically do not want the expected version, and she delivers something stranger and better every time.
30. Andre Wells
Andre Wells has produced more than 4,000 events in Washington, DC, including presidential inaugural balls, which are among the most logistically unforgiving celebrations in America. His firm, Events by Andre Wells, handles the capital's red-carpet society events and corporate work for clients like Disney and BET. In a city where events are politics by other means, Wells has been the trusted name for decades.
31. Mary Giuliani
Mary Giuliani earned the nickname caterer to the stars, and then outgrew it. Her New York firm produces full events for clients like Vogue, HBO, and Bradley Cooper, with food at the center but never the whole story. Three books and regular television appearances made her one of the industry's most visible personalities, and her events have a signature warmth: fancy without being precious, which is harder than it sounds.
32. Jes Gordon
Jes Gordon has spent decades producing corporate and social events out of New York and Los Angeles with a style true to the name of her firm, properFUN. Author of Party Like a Rock Star and a familiar face from television, she has collected ISES and BizBash honors while staying refreshingly blunt about how the industry actually works. Her events deliver polish without pretension, and her influence runs through a generation of planners she has mentored.
The New Guard, Powerhouses, and Global Masters
33. Diann Valentine
Diann Valentine planned celebrations for Usher and Toni Braxton, hosted her own wedding television, and changed the look of American events along the way: the Tiffany-blue craze traces to her. One of the most recognizable Black planners in the industry's history, her influence shows up in rooms she has never entered.
34. Yifat Oren
Yifat Oren is the planner Hollywood's most private stars hire when they want a flawless event and no coverage. Her understated, editorial style has made her Los Angeles firm one of the most quietly coveted operations in the industry. The absence of publicity is the point, and the client list behind it is extraordinary.
35. Lisa Vorce
Lisa Vorce produces destination events that photograph like films, including John Legend and Chrissy Teigen's Lake Como celebration, one of the most photographed private events ever staged. Vogue and Martha Stewart have both ranked her among the best working. Complicated productions in faraway places are her specialty, delivered serene.
36. Todd Fiscus
Todd Fiscus is Texas luxury at full scale. His Dallas firm, Todd Events, designs for brands like Tom Ford, Rosewood, and amfAR alongside the state's most ambitious private celebrations, and The Knot placed him on its Luxe List. For two decades he has been the definitive name in a market that likes its events big and gets them right.
37. Sasha Souza
Sasha Souza founded her Napa-based firm in 1995 and built one of Northern California's most awarded design operations, collecting ILEA and Event Solutions honors while writing two books and mentoring a generation of West Coast planners. Wine country's polished, produced style owes a real debt to her.
38. Liron David
Liron David's Eventique is the strongest new-guard corporate operation in New York. BizBash named him a 2025 Industry Innovator, Eventex put him on three 2025 Powerlists, and his firm's productions for clients like TikTok and the Humane Society gala have collected multiple Event Experience Awards. The next era of corporate events looks like his work.
39. Holly Loulan
In 2025, the Special Events Gala Awards named Holly Loulan Designer of the Year, the industry's top individual design prize. Working from Honolulu with MC&A, she produces corporate and destination events across the Pacific, and her winning work proved a point the mainland sometimes forgets: some of the best design in the industry is happening far from New York and LA.
40. Tom Kehoe
Tom Kehoe's Chicago firm, Kehoe Designs, is one of the country's great event design-and-decor houses, producing large-scale corporate and social events with fabrication, floral, and technology under one roof. A member of BizBash's Innovator Hall of Fame, Kehoe has spent decades proving that Chicago events answer to no coast.
41. Annie Senatore
Annie Senatore founded Design Foundry and grew it into a Washington, DC powerhouse of more than 125 people, the firm behind White House Correspondents' week parties for NBC, MSNBC, and CBS and the opening celebration of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. When Washington throws an event that matters, her team usually built it.
42. Mircea Manea
Mircea Manea's Blueprint Studios employs more than 700 people across South San Francisco and Las Vegas, producing at a scale few design firms attempt: a multi-year Formula 1 hospitality partnership, BottleRock 2025, and corporate work that earned an Inc. profile in 2025. This is event design as serious industry, and Manea runs one of its biggest engines.
43. Liz Castelli
Liz Castelli leads Tinsel Experiential Design, the New York agency acquired by Stagwell in 2023 with Castelli staying on as CEO. Her team's CES 2025 activations for Sony Music, GitHub, Pfizer, and Uber show the range: corporate experiential at the highest level, built by a firm that kept its creative identity through acquisition.
44. Nicky Balestrieri and Luigi Tadini
The Gathery, the Brooklyn studio Nicky Balestrieri and Luigi Tadini founded ten years ago, produces some of New York's most creative brand and cultural events. Their 2025 roster included the 15 Percent Pledge Gala at Paramount Studios and the WSJ Innovator Awards at MoMA. Their events feel authored, which is exactly why the most image-conscious clients keep coming.
45. Ty Kuppig
Trained in architecture and theater, Ty Kuppig designs events with a builder's eye and a director's timing. His firm TYGER Productions works from Boston, New York, and South Florida, and BizBash has honored him twice across two different eras, in 2019 and again in 2025. Longevity plus reinvention is the rarest combination in this field, and he has it.
46. Marc Hall
Marc Hall's Boston atelier produces botanical-driven event design for a clientele reported to include European royalty and an American president. His work sits at the intersection of floral art and event production, rooms built from living material, and it has made him one of New England's most quietly prestigious names.
47. Melissa Andre
Melissa Andre is the international name in celebrity parties. Her firm MADCo. works across Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York, with verified events for Drake and reported work for LeBron James and The Weeknd, plus a Forbes feature to match. Her events read like editorial shoots, which is why her clients, the most looked-at people alive, trust her with their private moments.
48. Billy Butchkavitz
For a generation, HBO's award-season parties were the ones everyone talked about, and Billy Butchkavitz designed them: the network's Emmys after-parties at the Pacific Design Center and its Golden Globes celebrations, from 1999 onward. His maximalist, transporting style defined an era of Hollywood entertaining, and his 2025 transformation of the Hollywood Roosevelt showed the signature is intact.
49. Edgardo Zamora
Edgardo Zamora's Revelry Event Designers operates from a 120,000 square foot warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, producing full-scale design for the city's biggest social and corporate events. In 2025 he was guest of honor at Istanbul's Table Design Exhibition, recognition that his influence now travels well beyond LA.
50. Mark Yumkas
Mark Yumkas' Angel City Designs produces the Recording Academy's official Grammy Celebration, the party where music's biggest night actually celebrates, along with Formula 1 Las Vegas and NBCUniversal work. From Los Angeles, his firm handles entertainment production at broadcast scale, and closing this list with the Grammys' own party feels about right.
The biggest events on earth are run by people who started with much smaller ones. Every name on this list was once unknown, working a room nobody was watching yet.
Max Miller is the founder of EventPlanning.com and an established planner with years of corporate planning experience.