Creative Brain Week Australia

Get excited! Creative Brain Week is coming to Australia. 

Creative Brain Week is the premier international event at the intersection of creativity, the arts, and brain science. Its prestigious flagship event has been held at Trinity College in Dublin for the last three years. 

In a bold and audacious move, Creative Brain Week is expanding its program to include four global Satellite events, and we are thrilled that Brisbane's bid for the honour of being one of these events was successful.

Creative Brain Week Australia (CBWA) is ‘Thematically Connected and Locally Informed’, bringing knowledge and nuance to the Dublin recipe.

Who should attend?

The event will bring together the general public, neuroscientists, educationalists, policymakers, artists, innovators, decision-makers, funders, and people who have lived experience in anything involving our brains being creative, or developing creative solutions.

What's it about?

The goal of the event is to share knowledge, break down silos and celebrate how brain science and creativity collide to seed new ideas in social development, technology, entrepreneurship, wellbeing and physical, mental and brain health across the life cycle.

The fully curated program runs across three consecutive mornings, showcasing some of the latest and most significant ideas, research, and programs in the creative brain space. General admission and concession tickets are available for the full three-morning program or on an event-by-event basis.

We are eager to welcome you as part of the creative brain community.

Biographies for the world-class speaker lineup are available here.

Event Schedule

Wednesday 12 June | 10:30am - 12:45pm | Register from 10:00am | Cohort, 16 Nexus Way, Southport, Queensland.

Speakers include:

• Dr Dinesh Palipana - Doctor, lawyer, & Co-lead research for BioSpine
• Richard Nash - CEO at BrainEye, a brain health smartphone technology
• Maggie Bell - Composer and PhD candidate whose music and compositional processes offer new insights into Dissociative Identity Disorder.
• Dr Martina de Witte - Leading an umbrella review of meta-analyses of arts-based interventions which will be part of a Lancet Global Series publication (led by the Jameel Arts and Health Lab NYU and WHO).
• Funmi Akindejoye - Environmental health researcher, visual artist & Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health.
• Dominic Campbell - Director and Co-Founder, Creative Aging International

Stay tuned for additional speaker announcements.

Thursday 13 June | 9:30am - 12:30pm | Register from 9:00am | Queensland Brain Institute, Building 79, Research Road, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

Speakers/performers include:

• Professor Gail Robinson - Clinical Neuropsychologist & Researcher
• Dr Margaret Moore - Researcher: What the predictive brain tells us about the world
• Mehershad Wadia - Neuroscientist and Comedian
• Randall Wood - Documentary Filmmaker & Producer
• Melissa Gill - Founder and Musical Director of Sing Sing Sing
• Sing Sing Sing - Dementia Choir

Plus a panel on Innovative Approaches and Creative Therapies for Brain Injury.

Panelists include:

• Fatima Nasrallah - Neuroscientist, Associate Professor at The Queensland Brain Institute
• Elizabeth Ambrose - Educational interpreter & Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit yoga instructor at the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
• Zara Gomes - Van Norton Li Community Health Institute, Queensland Ballet & Lily Spencer, Head of Community & Education, Queensland Ballet. Speaker (Friday) & Panelist.
• Magnus Bye Blumenfeld - Physiotherapist researching technology-driven treatments, research student at RECOVER Injury Research Centre.

Friday 14 June | 9:30am - 12:30pm | Register from 9:00am | Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Queensland Cultural Precinct, Stanley Place, South Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Speakers include:

• Debbie Brittain - QAGOMA Art & Dementia Program, Churchill Fellow
• Professor Felicity Baker - Music Therapy & Dementia Researcher, Uni Melb.
  
• Zara Gomes - Van Norton Li Community Health Institute, Queensland Ballet & Lily Spencer, Head of Community & Education, Queensland Ballet.
• Jim Hogan - Innovator, Neuroinclusion Pioneer & Chief Innovation Evangelist @ Google Cloud
• Waveney Yasso - Composer, performer and proud Yuwi Burra & South Sea Island descendant

Plus a panel on Breaking down silos to forge collaboration & impact.

Panelists include:

• Alison Canty - Neuroscientist & Associate Professor at the Wicking Dementia Research & Education Centre
• Vivienne Neilan - Director of Innovation at NIISQ - The National Injury Insurance Scheme - Queensland.
• Felicity Baker - Speaker & Panelist
• David Ross Painter - Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service, Data Science Product Developer
• Glenys Petrie 
• John Quinn