By Grammy and multi-BRIT Award-winning artist Olivia Dean will headline the third edition of Milk + Cookies Festival South Africa. Dean plays Sandringham Farm in Cape Town on 29 January and Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg on 31 January, joining the previously announced line-up of Elaine, Zee Nxumalo, Chelsea Sloan and Jade T. Three years in, the festival is still keeping fans guessing.
Accepting the Grammy earlier this year, Dean spoke about her grandmother Carmen, who left Guyana for London at eighteen with the Windrush generation. “I’m a product of bravery,” she said. It’s a fitting note for a festival built on the same principle: that culture belongs to the people who make it and carry it somewhere new.
That’s how Milk + Cookies Festival is built in each city it runs in, with local artists on the bill and South African creators, venues and partners shaping the programme. Across two days in Cape Town and Johannesburg, it brings music, food, fashion, art and design together through panels, workshops, pop-ups and parties alongside the festival stages. Additional acts and the full programme will be announced in the coming weeks.
Dean headlines a festival that effortlessly defies genre boundaries. Kaytranada opened the first South African edition in 2025 in front of 20,000 people, and Gunna followed in 2026. A producer, a rapper and a soul singer in three years is the pattern rather than the exception, and the crowd has followed it: a global, genre-agnostic audience that turns up for the experience as much as the names on the poster. And now three years in, Milk + Cookies has become a fixture of the South African summer.
“People keep asking how Kaytranada, Gunna and Olivia Dean end up on the same bill,” said Chase Freeman, Head of Marketing at Milk + Cookies. “Never the same sound, always the same feeling. That’s the only brief we’ve ever had. We book for the people in the room, not for a genre, and they come for what the room feels like as much as the name on the poster. Three years in, that’s what South Africa has given us. We came here to put on a show and ended up building something with the people who live here, and it’s changed how we do this everywhere else.”
TICKETS
- Pre-registration: open now at milkandcookies
- Pre-sale: Wednesday, 28 October | 10:00 AM SAST
- General on sale: Friday, 30 October SAST via Howler, Cape Town and Johannesburg
This event is open to ages 18+ only.