2025 Creativity Conference Speakers

Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Vint Cerf has the Turing Award (the “Nobel Prize for computing”) for co-inventing the internet—indeed, he coined the word “internet”—and his current job title is  Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Curator Emerita of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Director, and Director of the Center for Design Thinking at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ellen Lupton investigates how graphic design affects our daily lives.

Philosopher, novelist, MacArthur Fellow and National Medal of the Humanities winner Rebecca Goldstein, author of “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” pursues human drives to find out what it is in life that matters.

Recipient of the Golden Plate award from the American Academy of Achievement, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has changed how we think about humankind with such bestselling books as The Language Instinct and Enlightenment Now.

A second returning Creativity Conference favorite, the MacArthur-winner Patricia Wright, updates us on her continuing efforts to conserve the lemurs of Madagascar, and will report on several extraordinary new discoveries from that island nation.

George Steinmetz has taken to the air to explore remote corners of the world, creating extraordinary aerial photographs of both natural and human-generated landscapes, most recently documenting global food production for his book, Feed the Planet.

Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing made the best seller lists for over 150 months, making it one of the most successful novels of all time; she is also a significant conservationist, writing Cry of the Kalahari and other books about her studies in Africa.

Former chief economist at the World Bank, the 2018 Nobel laureate Paul Romer is widely known for his “economics of ideas,” a novel perspective concerning how human knowledge and innovations contribute to economic growth and prosperity.

Frank Sulloway is widely known for work on the effect of birth order on personality, but he has also done extensive research in evolutionary biology, especially about the Galapagos islands, and has just finished a book on Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Work by Rita Colwell, the first woman to head the National Science Foundation, bridges many academic fields from oceanography to genetics, and her revolutionary discoveries have prevented countless of people from suffering with cholera.

Mark Moffett, tropical explorer and biologist, has been investigating the life and death of societies across the animal world and in humans right up to the present day, traveling with globe with the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Returning Creativity Conference favorite Apollo Robbins, expert on pickpockets, confidence crimes, and deception, “widely considered the best in the world at what he does” (New Yorker), will be joined by the magician and mentalist Ava Do.