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The Fifth Annual
CREATIVITY CONFERENCE
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L-R: Paul M. Bingham, photo courtesy the speaker; Harriette Cole, photo by HCM;
Tom Junod, photo by Lee Crum; George Makari by Dominique Nabokov;
Susan Rubin photo courtesy the speaker; Susan Wheeler, photo by Mel Edelman.
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A full-day program of lectures
and exchanging ideas with
six creative thinkers
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SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 2026
9:30 AM – 6 PM
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TICKETS:
General Ticket: $115*
Member Ticket: $95
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TICKET INCLUDES: Complimentary Breakfast, All 6 Talks, a Book Signing, and Wine & Cheese Closing reception with the speakers.
FULL-DAY TICKETS ONLY, Re-entry Permitted.
NO Tickets will be sold for individual talks or partial parts of the day.
*special pricing is available for first responders, active military, veterans, and those with special needs. For more information, please email info@thechurchsagharbor.org
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Our much-loved and highly anticipated annual Creativity Conference returns! Now in its fifth year, this full-day celebration of bold thinking in the arts and sciences brings together visionaries who are truly celebrated in their fields whose work has shaped conversations and expand the boundaries of creativity. Curated by April Gornik, this conference once again offers a rare opportunity to intimately learn and engage with remarkable thinkers and makers in one mind-expanding day! Join us for an unforgettable gathering of insight, inspiration, and creative exploration – don’t miss the chance to experience these extraordinary voices up close.
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Our distinguished speakers:
PAUL BINGHAM – Author & Professor Emeritus, Biochemistry and Cell Biology, SUNY Stony Brook
Speaking On: Uniquely Human Creativity Is An Evolved Property
We Now Understand
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HARRIETTE COLE – Award-winning lifestyle expert and advice columnist. Author of How to Be, former editor-in-chief at Ebony magazine, and recipient of the Women of Excellence Award
Speaking On: Making Confidence Your Superpower
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TOM JUNOD – two-time National Magazine award-winning Esquire writer and journalist
Speaking On: The Secrets of Creativity: Secrets
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GEORGE MAKARI – Historian, Psychiatrist, Best Selling Author, and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell
Speaking On: Imagining Strangers: Xenophobia, Then and Now
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SUSAN RUBIN – 30+ Year Math Education Veteran and Math Student Teacher supervisor at Columbia University
Speaking On: Bringing Creativity into the Math Classroom
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SUSAN WHEELER – Multi-award-winning Poet, Princeton University Professor Emerita, and author of Record Palace, Assorted Poems, and Meme
Speaking On: Noodling and Ambition
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This full day of curiosity and intrigue will begin with a light breakfast featuring bagels, coffee, and juice. Individual presentations will begin after breakfast. Each speaker will offer insight and perspective, ignite inspiration, and spark creativity!
The day will conclude with a reception on our studio level, giving the audience an opportunity to speak with the lecturers and each other, reflecting on the ideas shared and insights gained. Books will be available for purchase and to be signed by the authors.
Tickets include breakfast and post-program reception. There will be a lunch break; however, no lunch will be provided. Attendees are welcome to come to as many talks as their schedule permits. No tickets will be sold for individual talks or partial parts of the day.
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FULL SCHEDULE – including the order the speakers will present will be posted to our website two-weeks before the Conference.
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OUR SPEAKERS
PAUL M. BINGHAM After completing a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard, Bingham spent two years at NIH in Research Triangle Park, NC, followed by joining Biochemistry faculty at Stony Brook University, where he remained. During the first several decades of his career he and his research group made diverse, important contributions to the molecular biology of complex animals.
He ultimately transitioned to other problems, including the long-unanswered “human uniqueness question” – how/why humans became a radically new kind of animal. He will discuss this work in detail during his lecture.
After a decade of intensive study, he was able to show that all previous approaches were inherently flawed. Building on these insights he developed the first coherent, complete theory of human uniqueness now referred to as “social coercion theory” (Bingham, 1999, Quarterly Review of Biology 74: 133-169). He was subsequently joined by crucial collaborators, Professors Joanne Souza (psychologist; Stony Brook University) and Daijiro Okada (game theorist; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton). They were able to advance and refine social coercion theory to its current sophisticated status. As he will discuss, social coercion theory accounts for the unique adaptive power, ethical capacity, and creative virtuosity of humans, with startling simplicity and clarity. (Bingham and Souza, 2009, “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe.” Amazon)
The vast cooperative social scale to which humans are evolutionarily adapted, as predicted by social coercion theory, has many consequences, including creative cooperation of unprecedented sophistication. The capacity of social coercion theory to allow us to understand human social/political behavior gives us the opportunity to shape a wiser, wealthier, more humane future.
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HARRIETTE COLE Harriette Cole’s mission is to help people identify and stand in their greatness. For more than 20 years she has coached entertainers, entrepreneurs and business professionals to present their brands effectively. In 2016, Harriette launched Dreamleapers, an educational platform designed to help people access and activate their dreams. Harriette is the nationally syndicated advice columnist of Sense & Sensitivity.
Cole hosts a radio show, Dreamleapers with Harriette Cole on WBAI in NYC; Dreamleapers Inspiration podcast and AARP Black Community Facebook broadcast, Real Conversations with AARP. She is a best-selling author and has published seven books on how to live a great life. Harriette began her career at Essence where she ran the lifestyle and fashion departments. She was founding editorial director of Uptown, and Creative Director and Editor-in-Chief of Ebony. She is a senior fellow for Encore.org.
Cole serves on the board of trustees of The PRASAD Project, the ACCE audience development committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jack and Jill of America, Inc. and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
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TOM JUNOD is a senior writer of ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previous he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. In The Days of My Youth, I was Told What it Means to Be A Man, published by Doubleday, is his first book.
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GEORGE J. MAKARI Historian, essayist, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist, George Makari is the author of Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction of the year, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. He also wrote Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, a 2015 Guardian Best Book of the Year, and the widely acclaimed Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. His books have been translated into twelve languages, and his essays have won numerous honors and have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He conducts a podcast with artists and writers on the nature of the imagination.
Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, Dr. Makari is Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he also is in clinical practice. A graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, he lives with his family in New York City.
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SUSAN RUBIN is a retired high school math teacher, with over 30 years of teaching experience in many different school settings. This included some easy learning environments and some not so easy learning environments. Some students were very motivated, and others were unmotivated and inattentive.
Rubin taught at Columbus High School (Bronx), McClymonds High School (Oakland, California), Park East High School (Experimental high school in East Harlem), Washington Irving HS (an all-girls school in Manhattan), and Stuyvesant High School (A specialized high school for Math and Science in Manhattan).
During her 20 years at Stuyvesant High School, Rubin offered the students an opportunity to do a creative math project for extra credit. The project needed to have relevance to the math the students were learning in class. The results were amazing, from needle point, poetry, artwork, songs, sculptures, to videos and more! Each year, Rubin arranged for the student projects to be displayed in a glass showcase at Stuyvesant High School.
After she retired, Rubin was a supervisor of math student teachers at Columbia University. She shared the creative projects with the math education students at Columbia as well as the math educators at Queens College and lectured at the annual meeting of the ATMNYC (Association of Teachers of Mathematics NYC). Her lectures were always well received.
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SUSAN WHEELER is the author of a novel, Record Palace (Graywolf Press) and six collections of poetry, including Assorted Poems (Farrar Straus & Giroux) and Meme (University of Iowa Press) which was shortlisted for the National book Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is Professor Emerita at Princeton University and lives in Philadelphia. Wheeler has given readings throughout Europe, the UK, Canada and the US.
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The Church was established in 2019 by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik. Housed in a deconsecrated 19th-century church, its doors were opened in April 2021. Our mission is to foster creativity and to honor the living history of Sag Harbor as a maker village. The East End represents an exceptional artistic legacy, spanning the practices of indigenous art of several centuries ago, Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th Century, and the many celebrated writers, makers, musicians, and visual artists of the recent past and current moment. Core programming includes visual art exhibitions, concerts and events, educational programming, workshops, lectures, and an artist’s residency.
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The Church’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
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The Church
48 Madison Street
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
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