Annual Art & Character Conferences

D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University and co-editor of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (Columbia University Press, 2023) as well as Twelve Theses on Attention (Princeton University Press, 2022), a manifesto of the “Friends of Attention” coalition — creators of the non-profit Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, which Burnett directs. He co-curated the “Practices of Attention” program at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, and is associated with the speculative collective ESTAR(SER). In 2023 he was a visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland. Burnett writes widely on technology, culture, and media. www.dgrahamburnett.net

Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London, where she has taught since 2011 following a lectureship at the University of Liverpool. She studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD, 1995–2002). Professor Carlisle is the author of eight books, including acclaimed philosophical biographies of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot, and she is the editor of George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics. In 2024, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. She currently serves as President of the British Society for Philosophy of Religion.

Adam Green is a Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University. His main interest is in human creative intelligence and especially in understanding how neural processes constitute our best ideas. Adam’s work includes research into endogenous neural mechanisms and exogenous neurostimulation that support creative relational reasoning, as well as research on the neuroscience of teaching and learning in real-world educational contexts. He is a founder and former president (2019-2021) of The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, and Editor-In-Chief at Creativity Research Journal. Adam received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth and did his post-doctoral training at Yale.

L. Gregory Jones is President of Belmont University. Prior to serving at Belmont, Greg served in a variety of faculty and administrative leadership roles at Duke University. Greg is known as a leader and strategist whose creative engagement has helped institutions across the world and in local communities to create transformational resource models. He is known for an entrepreneurial mindset as well as emphases on character and purpose in higher education, emphases in his leadership at Belmont. He is the author or editor of 19 books, and has authored more than 200 essays/articles. He is known for books on forgiveness (Embodying Forgiveness and the co-authored Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven), Christian leadership (the co-authored Resurrecting Excellence) and social innovation (Christian Social Innovation). His most recent book is the co-authored Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (2021).

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and formerly served as Professor at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.

He is the author of 27 books of European philosophy and literature (including three novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited 23 more. His books have been translated into 21 languages. He has received graduate degrees from McGill University, The National University of Ireland, and The University of Paris, as well as several honorary degrees.

He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is currently a member of the Royal Irish Academy and received the Research Ireland Medal for distinguished international scholarship in 2025.

As a public intellectual he presented numerous series on culture and philosophy for Irish and British radio and television, and broadcast extensively on the European and international media (France Culture, ABC, CBC, NPR).

He is currently the international director of the Guestbook Project–Hosting the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality.

Dario Robleto is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Houston, Texas. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in prominent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media outlets, including Radiolab, Krista Tippett's On Being, and the New York Times. Robleto has served as a visiting artist, researcher, and lecturer at various cultural and scientific institutions, including the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT, and the Center for the Advancement and Study of Visual Art at the National Gallery. From 2018 to 2023, he was Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. In 2016, he was appointed Texas State 3-D Artist Laureate, and in 2025, Robleto was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College. He is currently working on his first book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, co-authored with Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts, which will be published by Scribner.