For two days in October, a sprawling mid-century office complex in Holmdel will fill with the particular energy of people who really, truly love cats. The Catsbury Park Cat Convention returns to Bell Works on Oct. 10 and 11, 2026, bringing with it a lineup of celebrity guests, dozens of vendors, expert panels, on-site adoptions and a pop-up cat cafe where visitors can meet animals looking for homes. It is part celebrity meet-and-greet, part adoption event, and part unabashed celebration of the species.
The convention is the flagship fundraiser for Catsbury Park, a 501(c)3 New Jersey nonprofit corporation (tax ID 81-3366139) based in Asbury Park. The organization describes its mission as helping save the lives of cats and kittens in need through rescue, trap-neuter-return work and education at the Jersey Shore and beyond. Proceeds from the convention benefit Catsbury Park and its rescue partners.
The 2026 edition is headlined by Jackson Galaxy, the cat behaviorist and television personality familiar to anyone who has watched My Cat From Hell, along with comedian Drennon Davis. Organizers have also announced that Evil Larry, a viral internet meme cat, will appear to meet fans. Tickets went on sale July 10. The event's own website bills it as a weekend packed with special guests, live entertainment, local artists and an eclectic community of animal lovers.
To understand how a cat convention came to exist in New Jersey at all, it helps to go back to a storefront on Cookman Avenue. Catsbury Park opened a cat cafe in downtown Asbury Park in 2017, one of the earlier American entries in a trend that had taken hold in Japan and was just beginning to spread here. The cafe let customers sip coffee in the company of free-roaming, adoptable cats, and it quickly became a local curiosity that turned into a genuine rescue operation. Over the years the organization found homes for hundreds of cats, and it drew a certain amount of star power: the pop singer Kesha visited in November 2018, posing with Catsbury Park founder and owner DJ Bornschein and going home, reportedly, with a tiger tattoo.
The convention itself debuted on April 7 and 8, 2018, at Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park. It was a deliberate departure from the traditional cat show. As NJ.com reported at the time, animals in attendance would not be judged as contestants in a beauty or breed competition. Instead, the draw was the internet's new aristocracy of cats. Fans paid as much as $100 to rub elbows with, pet and photograph Instagram-famous felines at celebrity meet-and-greets, complete with paw-print autographs. Among the headliners that first year was Lil Bub, the diminutive, tongue-out cat from Bloomington, Indiana, who had feline dwarfism and osteopetrosis and a following of well over a million on Instagram. The first day of the event fell, appropriately, on Caturday, social media's term for its Saturday cat hashtag party.
That first convention set the template the event still follows: no cats allowed for ordinary attendees, with the exception of the celebrity animals, and an audience of cat people of all stripes rather than breeders and judges.
Then came the pandemic, and with it a period of change. Catsbury Park closed its Cookman Avenue cat cafe in 2021, another casualty of COVID-19's effect on downtown Asbury Park, but the organization's rescue and adoption work continued without pause. The convention went on a long hiatus. When it returned in 2024, it did so in a new home and a new format: a single day, Oct. 5, at Bell Works in Holmdel. That comeback drew more than 2,500 attendees and more than 50 vendors, with adoptable cats stealing the show.
The response was strong enough that organizers expanded again for 2025, returning to a full two-day weekend on Oct. 11 and 12 at Bell Works. That year's lineup included Hannah "Kitten Lady" Shaw, an internationally recognized kitten rescuer, and Jackson Galaxy, along with returning favorites like cat tattoos from Neptune Tattooville, now with a dedicated cat tattoo contest, and CatMan Bingo hosted by the Catman of West Oakland. There were on-site adoptions, a pop-up cat cafe and educational seminars led by City By The Sea Vets. "After such a long break, we were honestly blown away by how incredible last year's convention turned out," Bornschein said at the time. "The response from the cat community was overwhelming in the best way. This year, we're back for two full days, and it's already shaping up to be our biggest, best, and most meaningful Catsbury event yet."
The venue itself is part of the appeal. Bell Works is the reimagining of the former Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, a 2-million-square-foot mid-century modern landmark designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates and built between 1959 and 1962 at a cost of about $20 million. For decades it served as a research and development facility for the Bell System and later Bell Labs, until 2007. After a $273 million renovation completed in 2013, it reopened as a mixed-use development under Somerset Development, with a vast central atrium that now hosts markets, concerts, theater productions and, on occasion, a great many cats. The building has found a second life on screen as well, standing in for the exterior of the Lumon headquarters in Apple TV's Severance, which means convention-goers may find themselves petting adoptable kittens in a space that looks uncannily familiar.
That juxtaposition, a cathedral of mid-century corporate optimism given over to cat tattoos and bingo, is a fair summary of what the convention has become. It is a fundraiser, certainly, and the adoption lounge is the heart of it. But it is also a gathering for a community that has spent the better part of a decade building itself a home in New Jersey, one rescued cat at a time.
The Catsbury Park Cat Convention runs Oct. 10 and 11, 2026, at Bell Works, 101 Crawfords Corner Road, Holmdel. Tickets are required and are available through the convention's website.