Over the past ten years, our field has focused on measuring creativity to study innovation, problem-solving, and creative thinking. Somewhere along the way, the creative arts were pushed out to the fringe. Liberty to Create invites us to revisit that imbalance.
After ten years, SfNC is ready to be emotional, expressive, and unapologetically engaged with the arts. We can ask how art is produced and experienced in the brain without stripping it of its vitality. We can balance our need for empirical clarity with the desire to be provoked and delighted. Our science will advance not by minimizing this tension but by confronting it.
This is an invitation to reconnect with expression; to remember that art is not only a means to an end, not only important because it improves health or well-being or contributes to economic growth, but because it is essential to what it means to be human.
Art moves us, unsettles us, and speaks when words fail. It satirizes, resists, and tells the truth when the truth is hard to say. We should allow ourselves to revel in its subversive pleasures because in creative expression, we find freedom. This isn’t secondary to creativity’s “real” value – this is the real value.
Liberty to Create, the theme of SfNC 2026, is a space to explore both joy and tension. It will be a forum for rigorous scientific conversation and a living performance to experience and participate in. SfNC2026 is where the study of creativity finds its way back to the creative act itself, because we need the arts now more than ever.
Join us in reaffirming the liberty to create, and the creativity that sets us free.
Abstract Submissions
Abstract submissions are now open and will close on February 1st, 2026.
This year, we are soliciting traditional scientific abstracts for talks and posters, as well as artistic abstracts for work, presentations, and exhibitions from artists, practitioners, and creators.
You must be an SfNC member or be sponsored by an SfNC member to submit a scientific abstract.
You do not need to be an SfNC member to submit an artist abstract, but are expected to become one to present if accepted.
Registration details coming soon.
Why Philadelphia?
Philadelphia embodies the very tension we’re exploring; a city of high and low culture, of preservation and rupture. The first UNESCO World Heritage City in the US, as famous for its cheesesteaks and DIY music scene as for its world-class art museums. It holds the largest collections of works by Cézanne, Rodin, Renoir, and Duchamp outside of France, but is also home to Gritty, the deranged hockey mascot. Philadelphia is the birthplace of American democracy and the city that killed a hitchhiking robot. It oozes creativity and personality, and is more than a little bit wild. It’s going to be a blast.
We’re putting on a show — literally.
Hosted at the FringeArts Building, Philadelphia’s premier center for alternative performance arts, SfNC2026 will make full use of its dynamic space: a 250-seat theater, a lively restaurant and bar, and an open-air patio along the Philadelphia riverfront.
This immersive venue will allow us to create an environment that embodies our theme. We will explore the humanistic, expressive, and subversive power of art, drawing inspiration from Philadelphia’s revolutionary spirit, past and present. As the city draws international attention during America’s 250th anniversary, SfNC 2026 will offer a timely and memorable reflection on creativity, freedom, and the power of art to challenge convention and energize the human spirit.
