SfNC Events and Programming

In addition to our annual meeting, each year SfNC hosts a number of virtual events and programming for our members and our community. This page contains information about these events. For information about the SfNC annual meeting (our annual conference) visit SfNC 2024 and Past Meetings.

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In the spirit of fostering communication between scientists, artists, and practitioners, SfNC has developed a talk series titled CrossTalk: Conversations at the Intersection of Art and Science. In these (virtual) events, we host conversations between creativity researchers and artists to promote new perspectives for the study and practice of creativity. These are not research presentations. Rather, these interdisciplinary dialogues are informal and seek to engage a thoughtful discussion.  

Past Events

Our last event took place on November 17th, 2023 and included two sessions. Click on the links below to watch the recordings (you may need to register if you haven’t already).

Methods in Creativity Research (Sponsored by CRJ)

1:30 - 3:00 PM EST

How can we best study creativity in the brain and behavior, and how do the methods we use influence what we can discover? In this fascinating panel discussion, SfNC scientists showcased their latest thinking on operationalizing creativity and its neural and behavioral underpinnings.

Featuring: Yuhua Yu, Mark Beeman, Ron Beghetto, Ross Anderson, and Jared Kenworthy. Moderated by Adam Green, Editor-in-Chief, CRJ

CrossTalk: Fiery & O’Neill Cushman

3:00 - 4:00 EST

What do you get when you mix a moral psychologist and an artist? How do the processes of experimentation in science mirror the creative process in art? In this CrossTalk event, brothers Fiery Cushman (a psychology professor at Harvard) and O'Neill Cushman (a visual artist) considered the intersection between creativity and the visual arts and the relationships between their work and identities. Moderated by Will Orwig (Harvard University).

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Click here to find information and archived recordings of our past CrossTalk events.

Spring 2023 CrossTalk Event: Friday, April 21, 2023

We welcomed the CrossTalk speakers for this event, Susan Rogers, Professor at Berklee School of Music who was the pioneering female audio engineer on Prince’s legendary album Purple Rain before shifting careers to neuroscience, and Ed Robertson, lead singer and songwriter of the band Barenaked Ladies, for a conversation moderated by Indre Viskontas.

Fall SfNC Virtual Event - November 4, 2022

Our Fall 2022 SfNC Virtual Event took place on November 4, 2022 and included three fantastic sessions:

Our Methods series takes a deep dive into the tools used by creativity researchers. In this session, we focused on creativity interventions, exploring whether and how creativity can be enhanced, featuring Caroline Di Bernardi Luft (Brunel University, London); Caitlin Mills (University of Minnesota), and Kate Eskine (Wheaton College, Massachusetts).

SfNC Sandbox: This session revolved around unfinished projects. It is especially relevant for students and postdocs, but we invite all our members to attend. The goal is to provide input and spark collaboration on projects in progress. Do you have results that are hard to interpret? Have you hit an analysis roadblock? Did you collect pilot data and need to adjust the study design? This session will feature brief presentations by researchers with ongoing projects, which will serve as a jumping-off point for conversation. Join us for constructive feedback, finding collaborators, and brainstorming new interpretations, analyses and follow-up studies!

CrossTalk: Karen Paik (Pixar Animation Studios) and Angus Fletcher (Ohio State University), who discussed the science of stories.

Fall SfNC Virtual Event - October 15, 2021

On October 15, 2021, we held two working sessions and a CrossTalk event:

  1. SfNC Methods: In this session we took a deep dive into divergent thinking tasks. We featured a group of speakers who are experts on all things divergent thinking: Yoed Kenett (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), Mark Runco (Southern Oregon University), Paul Silvia (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), and Selcuk Acar (University of North Texas) who shared insights on different scoring methods, instructions and other methodological considerations.

    You can watch the session here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/sfnc-methods---divergent

  2. SfNC Works in Progress: This session revolved around unfinished projects. It was especially relevant for students and postdocs. The goal was to provide input and spark collaboration on projects in progress. Because the work was in progress, we won’t be re-broadcasting this session but invite you to come to a future Works in Progress meeting.

  3. CrossTalk: Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture and the founding Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. His research explores the field of neuroaesthetics: how our brain experiences and responds to art. Lucas Kelly is a renowned visual artist, with work featured across several solo and group exhibitions, most notably in the survey of abstract painting “The Painted World” at PS1 Museum of Modern Art. As the inaugural Artist in Residence for the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, Lucas has collaborated with Anjan on a forthcoming exhibition, considering the emotions involved in aesthetic engagement informed by research. This CrossTalk featured a moderated conversation between Anjan and Lucas, discussing topics at the intersection of neuroscience and experience of visual art. This CrossTalk event is archived here.

Previous CrossTalk Events and Recordings

CrossTalk 2: Feeling the Beat: The Neuroscience of Movement and Dancing with Parkinson’s Disease

This CrossTalk event was held on Friday, June 25, 2021. This hour-long event featured a moderated conversation between Dr. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist and Associate Professor at Western University, in London, Ontario studying beat perception and the brain, and David Leventhal, Program Director of Dance for PD, an organization that offers therapeutic dance classes for people with Parkinson's Disease. This CrossTalk event is archived here.

CrossTalk 1:

The first event was held on Friday, February 26 at 4pm ET. This hour-long event featured a moderated conversation between Paul Seli, professor of psychology at Duke University and leading researcher on the topic of mind wandering, and Alexa Miller, renowned expert of observation and founder of Arts Practica: a consultancy firm which offers arts-based workshops to promote diagnostic safety for healthcare professionals. This CrossTalk event is archived here.