Social Impact

CreativeMornings DC

Skylight Pavillion

Join us for CreativeMornings DC, a free breakfast lecture series for creative communities. Doors open at 8:30 a.m., event begins at 9 a.m. As always, registration is free but required.

Fri. Jun. 23, 2023 8:30a.m.

  • Fri. Jun. 23, 2023 8:30a.m.

Program

Started in New York City by Tina Roth Eisenberg, founder of swissmiss, CreativeMornings is a face-to-face breakfast event series connecting and celebrating the global creative community. Everyone is creative. Everyone is welcome. Doors open at 8:30 a.m., Event begins at 9 a.m. The theme of this discussion is “Reverie".

When your gaze softens around the edges, where does your mind travel? What thoughts arise unbidden? Reverie beckons us to dream while awake, spinning loose associations that seem to emerge from somewhere not entirely inside or outside of you. Our woolgathering summons past memories and nascent fantasies. We turn them over and over, like smooth stones in our hand, making meaning.

Neuroscientists have found that daydreaming ignites your brain’s default mode network. Counterintuitively, this unfocused part of the mind is where many creative breakthroughs take place — think Archimedes‘ fluid mechanics in a bathtub and Newton’s gravity under the apple tree. When you’re not preoccupied with solving a problem and chaining yourself to your desk in a fit of productivity, your mind is free to drift, roaming for the pieces that might complete the puzzle unexpectedly.

Pay attention to what lulls you into reverie. What conditions disarm your focus? Let your thoughts float and not settle on anything, but drift like a cloud, or a child skipping across a sidewalk on a hot summer day.

Artist

  • Speaker

    Nicole Dowd

    Nicole Dowd is the Head of Public Programs at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, overseeing planning and implementation of museum-wide public programs and community engagement. Previously she served as Head of Cultural Programming at Apple in Washington DC, developing public programs and piloting the Today at Apple Creative Studios teen program. Over the last decade she has worked with and mentored artists throughout the DC region, as Director of Arts Programs at Halcyon and Program Manager of the Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship. Nicole received a master’s degree in exhibition design from the Corcoran College of Arts and Design and studied fine art, art history and journalism at the George Washington University. She is passionate about building meaningful connections between artists, cultural practitioners, and organizations which can help to support and sustain their work. She currently serves on the Board of Directors at The Nicholson Project, a DC-based artist residency and community garden.

    In her spare time, Nicole rock climbs and regularly daydreams about Korean food and traveling to distant sandstone cliffs.

Terms and Conditions

All events and artists subject to change without prior notice.

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