2026 Creativity Conference Speakers

Pulitzer-winning war and presidential photographer David Hume Kennerly, our returning Sea Island speaker, has taken several of the most consequential images of the last half century and is now the first University of Arizona Presidential Scholar.

MacArthur fellow Bonnie Bassler studies how microorganisms collaborate in making decisions, allowing whole populations, at times made up of multiple species, to create complex, versatile communities—and how we might control their ill effects.

The Italian architect, engineer, author, and urban planner Carlo Ratti focuses on the intersection between natural and artificial worlds in his exploration at MIT on how technologies will change how we design and ultimately live together in cities. 

Inventor and engineer Larry Howell uses pop-up, origami and flexible mechanisms to fundamentally re-imagine how machines should function in building devices for hospitals, NASA researchers, the U.S. Department of Defense, and many others.

Member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Wendy Red Star is a MacArthur-winning artist who explores colonialism in her work, using multiple media to address Native American life both with respect to the past and in contemporary culture.

Cosmologist and philosopher Sean Carroll has made diverse contributions to physics while being widely lauded for his podcast Mindscape and many popular works, including such books as Something Deeply Hidden and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.

Honored for his conservation efforts by the United Nations, George Archibald, the highly decorated founder of the International Crane Foundation, famously began his vast efforts by helping rescue the whooping crane from the brink of extinction.

Inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, American Book Award winner Jericho Brown is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets whose poems the MacArthur Foundation describes as achieving an “astonishing lyrical beauty.”

Charlie Rice won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the virus causing Hepatitis C, an accomplishment that the Nobel committee wrote “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”

Pioneer psychologist and neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, author of the recent bestseller “Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory,” looks at memory as an implement we use to plot the course of our lives.

Winner of the Friend of Darwin award for presenting evolution to the public, Riley Black has become a star authority on dinosaurs, and paleontology generally, for her elegant writing in books such as The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and When the Earth was Green.

David Sulzer has remarkable achievements in two realms, as a scholar of the physics and neuroscience of music; and as David Soldier, an iconoclastic musician and composer, who for example organizes an orchestra made up entirely of elephants.