On Saturday, April 5, The Church will host its fourth annual Creativity Conference. The daylong event begins with coffee and breakfast for all attendees at 9:30 a.m. A lunch break will be offered from noon to 1 p.m. (lunch not included).
Composer Carter Burwell will lead off the presentations at 10 a.m. with “Why do films have music.” Burwell worked for years scoring Coen Brothers films and won an Academy Award for scoring Todd Haynes’s “Carol.” He also received nominations for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”
Next up will be Lucy Jacobs, a magnetic speaker and professor emerita of psychology and neuroscience at U.C. Berkeley. Her work synthesizes concepts from ecology, animal behavior, cognitive science and neuroscience in order to understand the evolution of universal cognitive traits, such as spatial memory and navigation. She will present “How To Get Rich Like a Squirrel (Without Going Nuts).”
Patricia McCormick, who has the distinction of being a banned-book author, will speak on “Creativity as a Form of Resistance.” Her work includes “Never Fall Down,” “SOLD” and she is the co-author of “I Am Malala.”
Susan Rogers is a behavioral neuroscientist at Berklee College of Music who teaches music cognition and psychoacoustics, and is also the sound engineer and multiplatinum-record producer known best for her work with Prince. Her talk is “Neural Underpinnings of Creativity, Mind Wandering, and Musical Improvisation.”
Lawrence Weschler will wind up the day with “Art and Science as a Parallel and Divergent Way of Knowing.” He is a longtime New Yorker writer, author and Director Emeritus of the Institute for the Humanities at New York University.
A brief panel and short Q&A will follow each speaker and a reception will be held at the end of the day from 5 to 6 p.m. with the presenters. Tickets are $115 ($95 members) which includes breakfast and reception. For more information, please visit thechurchsagharbor.org. The Church is at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor.
Staff Writer on Mar 31, 2025