The Gulf is investing billions in entertainment, but its biggest challenge may be finding enough trained performers and creative professionals.

Every year, when the new semester starts at Stardust Academy in Amman, the students can’t wait. They arrive with gifts and hugs for their teachers, all local now, a dream planted 15 years ago and now a reality. Alaadin Khasawneh has watched children walk in on the first day knowing nothing and stand on stage, shining, by the end of the year. Fifteen years after he founded the academy, some of those children are professional actors and singers, and some are now his teachers. “I work my dream job; I created something that didn’t exist,” he says. “My heart’s full.” But he knows his dream is bigger than one school.

Across the Gulf, governments are pouring billions into theaters, festivals, and entertainment districts, and the harder question is who will fill those stages.

Saudi Arabia’s entertainment sector drew 45.7 million visitors in the first half of 2026, with more than 7,200 companies now operating in the market, according to the Saudi Press Agency. The buildings are the visible part. The question that matters is who will stand on those stages.

That growth sits inside Vision 2030. It also sits beside the UAE’s National Strategy for the Cultural and Creative Industries, which targets 5% of national GDP by 2031. Across the region, the infrastructure is arriving faster than the people trained to use it. Industry demand is expanding faster than the talent pipeline. Campaign Middle East describes the mismatch plainly: demand for Saudi creatives has risen sharply across agencies, production houses, brand teams, entertainment companies, and government initiatives, while the supply of experienced professionals is unable to meet it. This is a question of time, not potential.

The regional data agrees. A 2026 survey of 127 Saudi film workers and industry figures, published in the Arabian Journal for Media and Communication, found that the shortage of trained professional cadres remains among the sector’s most prominent challenges. The result is that productions still bring in outside crews and performers to fill roles the local market cannot yet staff.

Khasawneh has spent 15 years on the other side of that finding. He founded Stardust Academy in Jordan in 2011 with roughly 30 students amongst all programs. Today, he says, they have at least 15 different programs, and it runs at capacity with waiting lists. For most of its first decade, he flew in Canadian instructors. Six years ago, he moved to an entirely local teaching staff. The shift exposed the structural problem in one sentence. “When I went local, I couldn’t find a teacher that could do two disciplines,” he says. One international teacher trained across disciplines could teach six styles of disciplines within the performing arts and still carry working knowledge of singing and acting. Local hires, however gifted, often specialized in one thing.

The answer was not to lower standards. It was to build larger teams and invest in how they worked together. Khasawneh describes his hiring logic as the best team who can deliver and who can work together. He accepts that the economics are harder. He argues the alternative is worse.

This is the part of the talent conversation that gets skipped. Governments can fund academies and scholarships. They cannot shortcut the years of practice that turn a promising teenager into a performer who can hold a commercial stage. Campaign Middle East notes that building a mature creative workforce is a generational process.

Khasawneh’s academy is a small test of what that process requires. Students do not only take classes. They audition, rehearse, and perform for paying audiences. The 32 shows that he has put on since Stardust Academy was created are full productions with original scores and staging.

A graduate leaves with a portfolio, not just a certificate.

The aftermarket matters as much as the training. Jordan has started to build one. The Royal Film Commission’s Jordan Film Fund supports local and regional productions through development, production, and post-production, and now, it’s in its 11th funding cycle. That scaffolding gives trained performers somewhere to go. Without it, even a strong academy produces graduates who leave the region to find work. That is something that fueled Khasawneh’s fire.

Khasawneh is direct about what he will not do. He says he has turned down partnerships that he believed would compromise his autonomy. He says, “I create a support system on behalf of my students that are ready for the next level. This is important and necessary because fame at a young age is very, very dangerous.” He works closely with parents to make sure they are aligned on how they will deliver future goals in the performing arts. In today’s world, Khasawneh contends a performing arts career is not a detour from serious education but a serious education in itself.

The next step, he says, is expansion. Stardust has already taken that model across the border. It won a bid, which Khasawneh says drew around 30 competing companies and academies, to create the original musical The Red Sea Rescue for AROYA, which he describes as the first cruise ship built in Saudi Arabia. He says both are still running today, and that the win convinced him Stardust was ready for bigger projects beyond Jordan. The model that worked in Jordan can be replicated in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, with local teams trained from the start. The academy also stages original regional work, not only imported musicals, which gives students a body of material that reflects where they are from.

The regional conversation about creative talent tends to count jobs. How many will the sector create? How many nationals will fill them? Those are fair questions. They are also the wrong starting points.

The better question is what a working pipeline looks like on the ground. It looks like students who are given the time and a dedicated teacher to find their voice in a language they are still learning, until the language and the voice arrive together. It looks like a student who has performed for a paying audience a dozen times before graduating. It looks like a payroll that includes alumni who once stood on the same stage.

None of that scales quickly. All of it scales. Khasawneh says he is ready to take the model beyond Jordan, and he is looking for partners who share his passion and are willing to do the grind he did.

The Gulf will build its cultural infrastructure within a decade. The talent to fill it will take a generation. The regions that understand the difference, and invest accordingly, will be the ones whose stages do not depend on imported acts five years from now. So what is a skyline of theaters worth if the talent never arrives to fill them? He built the pipeline once. Khasawneh says he is ready for the next stage, and the Middle East can bring it on.