Federica Busa

Federica Busa, Senior Advisor for Thematic, Content and Visitor Experience at Nuwa, is a visitor experience strategist with twenty years inside the World Expo system. She has worked at both ends of it, advising the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris on how Expo themes are developed, then running the thematic, content and visitor experience programme of Expo 2020 Dubai from bid to closing day. At Nuwa she advises on how Expo 2030 Riyadh turns its theme into content, programming and the experience visitors have on site, and on how suppliers and participants position their offer against what the Expo actually needs.

Federica spent ten years with Expo 2020 Dubai, joining at bid stage in 2012 and leaving after the site closed in 2022. She led theme development during the bid, then built and delivered the thematic and content strategy through to live operation, ending as Senior Vice President of Visitor Experience. Her teams covered placemaking, public realm activation, exhibitions, storytelling and multimedia engagement. She founded and curated the World Majlis, the Expo’s flagship programme of global dialogue, and led its official publications as a contributing author. Expo 2020 Dubai drew 24 million visits. The route from bid theme to delivered visitor experience, run once end to end at that scale, is what she brings to Riyadh.

Most recently Federica co-founded Busa Woodward, a Dubai practice advising governments, developers and operators on the human experience of large-scale destinations (World Expos, cities, cultural districts, waterfronts, event venues, mixed-use developments). The firm works through experience masterplanning, behavioural audits and spatial affordance mapping, keeping experience at the centre of a project and aligning operations, marketing and architecture around it.

Before Dubai, Federica spent six years in Paris as Counsellor to the Secretary General of the Bureau International des Expositions, the body that governs World Expos. She advised organisers on thematic development and content planning across the cycle, including Zaragoza 2008 and Shanghai 2010, shaped the BIE’s communication strategy and oversaw its rebranding. That work rests on a technical foundation: a PhD in Computer Science from Brandeis University in natural language processing and computational semantics, a Master’s from MIT Sloan School of Management, and a first career in language technology. She is a published author, and her current work applies neuroscience and semantic theory to how people read and move through designed space.