If The Church in Sag Harbor has established anything since opening to the public last April, it is the diversity of its programs and its commitment to creativity and innovation in all its forms.
Its first annual Creativity Conference will bring to Sag Harbor seven creative thinkers from different fields for a daylong event on Saturday.
The conference has been organized by Mark Moffett, a tropical biologist, and Melissa Wells. Dr. Moffett is a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution and the author of “Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With a Cast of Trillions” and “High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy,” among others.
The couple, who were married in 2008 in a traditional ceremony at the rim of a volcano on Easter Island, travel the world documenting new species and behaviors.
The conference will begin at 9 a.m. with Ken Kamler, an orthopedic microsurgeon and an expert on medicine under extreme conditions. He has made six trips to Mount Everest as an expedition doctor and climber. His treatment of the survivors of the 1996 storm that claimed 12 lives there was portrayed in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air.”
Karen Wynn, an artist and professor emeritus who ran the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, will follow Mr. Kamler at 10. Her studies have included morality in pre-verbal infants, how they relate to older people, and their understanding of numbers. She was featured in a 2012 episode of “60 Minutes.”
A technologist, engineer, set designer, architect, business expert, inventor, futurist, and former president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, Bran Ferren is a one-man creativity conference. An East Hampton native and former technical director of Guild Hall, Mr. Ferren will oversee the forthcoming renovation of its theater. He will speak at 11.
After a midday break, the conference will resume at 2 with a talk by Deirdre Barrett, a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, who teaches at the Harvard Medical School about dreams, imagery, creativity, and hypnosis.
Dr. Moffett and Ms. Wells will take the stage at 3 to discuss their work and travels. They will be followed at 4 by Pat Wright, a field scientist and conservationist based at Stony Brook University, who studies lemurs in Madagascar. The recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, she is the author of “High Moon Over the Amazon” and “For the Love of Lemurs.”
A cocktail reception for the speakers and the audience will take place from 5 to 6:30. Tickets, which include the reception, are $75. Ticket-holders will be welcomed for as many talks as they choose to attend, but tickets will not be sold for individual talks.
