Cole Neesmith on building Orlando’s immersive arts scene with Creative City Project

Vicky Landon, administrator for Orange County’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, hosted an edition of Artfully Orange featuring Cole Neesmith, founder and artistic director of Creative City Project. Neesmith traced his career from childhood performances to producing large-scale immersive events and described how his recent projects are intended to lift local artists and deepen community engagement.

Neesmith said he “grew up as a musician” and recalled that “the first time I worked professionally, it was for Walt Disney World when I was in fourth grade,” an early entry point to a life in live performance. He told the program that in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he started an events and marketing company called Memoir Agency to create original content and produce experiences for clients and community events.

Explaining his relationship to Creative City Project, Neesmith said the organization now has full-time leadership and that he has deliberately stepped back from day-to-day logistics so others can take the producer role forward. He described the February 2026 Immerse festival as an example of the project taking on “a new expression of itself” under staff leadership and said those changes helped the festival run more sustainably while still elevating local artists.

Neesmith credited public-facing events and civic engagement with producing concrete benefits for the local arts ecosystem. He recalled co-hosting a forum for Orange County mayoral candidates years earlier and said showcasing arts funding during election season helped produce tangible outcomes for arts organizations. “Showing up,” he said, is crucial: attending arts-and-culture meetings, city council and county commission sessions, and neighborhood meetings creates relationships that can move projects forward.

He described ways Creative City Project incubates artists, citing the Orlando Vocal Collective as one example. “Out of that in 2024 was birthed the Orlando Vocal Collective,” Neesmith said, noting the group has produced shows featuring the music of Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston.

On the meaning of “immersive” art, Neesmith used the London-based company Punchdrunk’s long-form, site-specific productions as a baseline. He said those productions created a “visceral” experience in which sound, light and movement surround the audience and even include one-on-one moments led by performers. “When you have that baseline for the word immersive, pretty much nothing else is immersive,” he said, arguing that successful immersive work supports the story without intrusive technology.

The conversation ranged from practical lessons about early, improvised event production to the strategic value of creating cycles of opportunity for artists. Landon closed the episode by thanking Neesmith for his contributions to the community and for joining the program.