Disguise’s inaugural Creators Circle Awards are open. Anyone who worked on a project with Disguise in 2026 can enter, and entries close on 19 November 2026.
The categories
Four, and the mix is better than the usual industry-awards shape:
- Programmers of the Year
- Operators of the Year
- Community Champion of the Year
- Rising Star
If you fit more than one, you can be nominated in more than one — provided each nomination recognises a different contribution or project.
Programmers and Operators as separate categories is the detail that signals this was written by people who know the work. In live production those are genuinely different crafts: programming a show is authoring — building the content, the timeline, the mapping, the cue structure — while operating it is live performance under pressure, with no second take and a stadium already full. Awards in this field routinely collapse them into one “technical” category and reward the person with the better showreel.
Community Champion and Rising Star cover the two things that otherwise never get recognised: the person who answers questions in the forum at midnight, and the person who has only been doing this eighteen months.
What six winners get
- An annual Disguise X1 license — explicitly “available to run on your own laptop or hardware of choice”
- A premium swag bag
- A Creators Circle Awards winner badge for social media or an email signature
- Recognition across Disguise and Creators Circle channels, with the chance to be featured in the annual 2027 Disguise Magazine alongside the work
The licence is worth $6,000 and the “your own hardware” clause is the substantive part. Disguise’s business is media servers — expensive, specialised machines that sit in a rack at the back of a venue — and an X1 licence you can run on a laptop you already own is a year of being able to build, rehearse and pitch work without hiring hardware. For a freelance programmer or someone early in their career, that is a materially different thing from a trophy.
Why this is worth an entry even if you do not win
Two reasons, and the second is the one people miss.
The entry is a written account of your own work, which most people in live production never produce. Tours end, the rig goes back in the truck, and the show exists as a handful of phone videos. Writing up what you did on a specific project — what the problem was, what you built, why it worked — is useful regardless of the outcome, and it is the thing you will want when someone asks what you have done.
Nomination in more than one category is explicitly allowed, so a single year’s work can be entered as a programming contribution and a community one. Few people take that option.
Entries close 19 November 2026 at disguise.one/en/creators-circle-awards.