05/20/2026
This year’s International Youth Media Summit takes place in Paris, France July 17-30, 2026. Any full-time student age 18-28 may apply.
Peace in Focus:
Voices Reaching Across Borders
The 21st International Youth Media Summit
July 17 – 30, 2026
Paris, France
Students who attend will be involved in the production of one of seven public service announcements. Topics include: Environment, Poverty, Woman’s Rights, Health, Youth Empowerment, Discrimination and/or Violence.
This is IYMS’s 21st year.
Please note that every student must finance their own travel costs including flights, board and lodging at the Paris location (price and rooms already agreed by IYMS).
You can visit the IYMS web site and see the films that have been produced every year, in different cities around the world. There are 1,500 alumni over 21 years, from 6 continents.
Students are not required to speak French.
IYMS Website: www.IYMS.org
How IYMS was born
IYMS was founded in 2006 by Evelyn Seubert and James Gleason (Cleveland Charter High School, Los Angeles, California) and Aileen Marshall (Screen School, Glasgow, Scotland) and organized by the Teen International Media Exchange (TIME). TIME was born on September 11, 2001 when the tragedy of the day’s terrorist attack motivated a group of Los Angeles media instructors to find a way to interrupt the vicious cycle of violence and revenge that threatened to overtake the lives of the young people they worked with.
These film teachers had seen firsthand teenagers’ surprising ability to learn how to cooperate and understand each other – in spite of ethnic antipathies – when that cooperation was necessary to create a film that they were passionate about. TIME’s first projects in early 2002 were over the internet with students in Scotland, following by in-person collaborations in Korea and Belize. In 2006 TIME founded the International Youth Media Summit, bringing 85 people from 26 countries to work together on media projects that would motivate others in their generation to take action. In the decade since then, TIME has continued both in-person and internet collaborative projects with over 700 American and international students, and the Summit has involved over 1,500 young people and mentors from more than 66 countries, reaching over 300,000 people with youth-created media pieces, personal appearances and outreach.
Locations of past Summits
So far, we have hosted 20 of our annual two-week events at the following locations:
* Los Angeles & La Crosse, the USA
* Kathmandu & Pokhara, Nepal
* Falkenberg, Sweden
* Sydney, Australia
* Karlovac, Croatia
* Belgrade, Serbia
IYMS Website: www.IYMS.org
Connecting young filmmakers and diplomats from around the world to explore ways of empowering their generation.
