The Church’s fourth annual Creativity Conference will bring five notables to the Sag Harbor venue for a full-day event on Saturday. The speakers include Carter Burwell, a composer; Lucia Jacobs, a professor of psychology and neuroscience; Patricia McCormick, an author; Susan Rogers, a neuroscientist and record producer, and Lawrence Weschler, a writer.
Doors will open at 9:30 for a light breakfast and coffee. The first two 45-minute presentations, featuring Mr. Burwell and Ms. McCormick, will start at 10. Following a break for lunch from noon to 1:15 (lunch is not provided), Ms. Jacobs, Ms. Rogers, and Mr. Weschler will speak.
Each presentation will be followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session, and a round-table discussion among the participants will begin at 4:15. A reception with the speakers will follow at 5, and the event will conclude at 6.
Mr. Burwell has composed the music for many feature films, among them “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Fargo,” “Gods and Monsters,” “Being John Malkovich,” “In Bruges,” “True Grit,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The subject of his talk is “Why Do Films Have Music?”
Ms. McCormick, a two-time National Book Award finalist, is the author of “Never Fall Down,” a historical novel based on a true story about a boy who survived the killing fields of Cambodia by playing music for the Khmer Rouge. “SOLD,” her nonfiction account of sexual trafficking, was made into a 2016 film starring Gillian Anderson. She will speak on “Creativity as a Form of Resistance.”
“How to Get Rich Like a Squirrel (Without Going Nuts)” is the subject of Ms. Jacobs’s presentation. She integrates animal behavior, ecology, and neuroscience into her studies of adaptive patterns of cognition in squirrels and other wild rodents, as well as humans. The Jacobs Lab of Cognitive Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has produced more than 50 articles on animal behavior and neuroscience.
Ms. Rogers, whose talk is titled “Neural Underpinnings of Creativity, Mind Wandering, and Musical Improvisation,” was a multiplatinum-earning record producer, engineer, and mixer best known for her work with Prince from 1983 to 1987. In 2021 she became the first female recipient of the Music Producers Guild Award for Outstanding Contributions to U.K. Music. Having earned her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience in 2010, she teaches psychoacoustics and neuroscience for the Berklee College of Music Online.
Mr. Weschler, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, is director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. His lecture, “Art and Science as a Parallel and Divergent Way of Knowing,” will explore the ways in which artists and scientists examine the world and the similarities between them, despite the common conception that there is a divide. The subjects of his books range from Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, to the artists Robert Irwin and David Hockney.
Tickets are $115, $95 for members, with special pricing available to first responders, active military, veterans, and those with special needs (via email to [email protected]). Tickets include the breakfast and closing reception. Attendees can come to as many talks as their schedules permit, but tickets will not be sold for individual presentations.
Canio’s will be on hand to help with book sales.
