Skip to main content
Teamwork concept : hands over the desk, representing brainstorming moment

Creativity Core Curriculum

Contact Information

Program

Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel
Assistant Provost, Academic Affairs & Director, MS Health Communication Design

Upcoming Events

March 25, 2026: Future Shock: Climate, Cities, & the Power of Imagination

Wednesday, March 25 • 5:00 p.m — 6:00 p.m.

Jefferson - East Falls Campus, Kanbar Campus Center Performance Space

What will the world look like in the next century? Is climate optimism even possible? Architect and visionary urban designer Vanessa Keith gives a resounding yes and shows how imagination and innovation can reinvent our collective future for the better. Her keynote sparks curiosity and invites the audience to imagine bold solutions to our biggest global challenges and to become the innovators who build them.

Keynote Speaker

Vanessa Keith

Vanessa Keith is a registered architect and the Founder and Principal of Studioteka, a New York-based award-winning design firm she founded in 2003. She is a seasoned and well-respected professor with twenty years' experience teaching design at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, CCNY, and Pratt Institute. A published author and frequent speaker, Vanessa is especially interested in visionary solutions to the issues faced by cities as they adapt to climate change. She is also keenly focused on sustainability and innovative technical and engineering solutions to environmental problems. Studioteka's work is multifaceted and encompasses architecture and interior design, economic development, planning, and feasibility studies, and research and development in emerging tech, gaming for social good, and virtual reality. Vanessa's background in sustainable economic development, her visionary leadership, writing, teaching, public speaking, research, and tireless search for practical and creative solutions to environmental problems are integral to all the firm's work.

Studioteka's architecture work has been featured in prestigious design publications including Frame, Hinge, Surface Asia, Urban Omnibus, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Metropolis, Design Bureau and Mark Magazine, as well as USA Today and print and media interviews. Her futuristic urban design work and innovative ideas have been featured in a Netflix documentary, The Future of Skyscrapers and the DC Environmental Film Festival and were honored by a 2023 Sundance Stars Collective Imagination Award. Along with her team at Tekamundi, she is currently developing an open-world game designed to inform and inspire engagement in the search for solutions to the climate crisis. This project draws from her groundbreaking book, 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, which envisions 14 cities around the world in the year 2100 that are successfully employing emerging technologies and innovative techniques to move beyond the climate crisis. Vanessa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religion (eastern religion and philosophy) from Columbia University, a Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia.University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Studioteka Design is certified as an MWBE by the New York/New Jersey Minority Supplier Development Council.

REGISTER TODAY

April 17, 2026: CREATIVITY FAIR - In Celebration of the United Nations World Creativity & Innovation Week

Friday, April 17 • 11:30 a.m. — 2:30 p.m.

Jefferson - East Falls Campus, Kanbar Campus Center Performance Space

A FREE event for our community. Join us for games, activities, treats, and prizes as we playfully explore our 2025-26 theme, "Creativity for Utopian Futures."

Register Today

Past Events

October 22, 2025

In this panel discussion, Jefferson faculty from diverse fields — including professors from Marketing & Management, Biology, Visual Communication Design and Architecture — will share how their work shapes bold visions for a better future, followed by an interactive discussion and Q&A.

April 11, 2025

In honor of the United Nations World Creativity and Innovation Week, Jefferson’s Creativity Core Curriculum is hosting our 3rd Annual Creativity Fair! Join us for a fun variety of physical and mental challenges and chances to win prizes.

April 2, 2025

February 19. 2025

This panel discussion is one of several events produced by the Creativity Core Curriculum to address the 2024-25 theme of "Creativity Within Conflict." This event provides an opportunity for you to hear from Jefferson faculty from diverse disciplines as they consider how conflict manifests into creativity in their work process and products. Short presentations will be followed by interactive discussion and Q/A.

Stephen DiDonato, PhD, LPC
Associate Professor, Jefferson College of Nursing
Senior Director for Strategic Engagements and Innovation, Jefferson Trauma Education Network

Lyn Godley, PhD
Professor of Industrial Design
Director, the Jefferson Center for Immersive Arts for Health

David Nitsch, PhD, MPH
Director, Emergency & Disaster Management Programs

Renée Walker
Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design
Partner, Gold Collective

Join us on Friday, April 19, from 11:30am to 2:30pm at the Kanbar Performance Space on our East Falls Campus for caption contests, brain-teasers, puzzles, physical challenges and more. In honor of the United Nations World Creativity & Innovation Week, Jefferson’s Creativity Core Curriculum will host our second annual fair, this year with a theme of creative puzzles and games. Attendees will receive free self-care kits while supplies last.

Coded Bias: Documentary Film Screening & Q&A with Director Shalini Kantayya

March 27, 2024

Technology should serve all of us, not just the privileged few. The award-winning documentary film, Coded Bias, highlights the stories of people who have been impacted by harmful technology and shows pioneering women sounding the alarm about the threats artificial intelligence poses to civil rights. The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and details the formation of the Algorithmic Justice League, a group leading a cultural movement towards equitable and accountable AI.

Pizza is included! After the film, interact with Emmy-nominated filmmaker, activist, and sci-fi fanatic, Shalini Kantayya. The evening will conclude with a raffle and prizes!

This event is co-sponsored by the Creativity Core Curriculum, the Kanbar Diversity Action Committee, and The Paul J. Gutman Library.

February 28, 2024

Jefferson faculty from across disciplines will make short presentations that explore both inspiring possibilities and deep concerns stemming from rapid developments in AI. Presentations followed by discussion with the in-person audience will focus on what these changes could mean for Jefferson students both now and in the future. Light refreshments and snacks provided.

Featuring Presentations from:

  • John Dwyer: Chair of the Department of Architecture
  • Kathryn Gindlesparger: Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the University Writing Program
  • Richard Hass: Program Director, PhD in Population Health Science and MS in Health Data Science
  • Barbara Kimmelman: Dean, College of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of History
  • Juan Leon: Assistant Provost for Faculty Development, Online Education & Assessment and Director, Online Learning at JCPH
  • Dimitrios Papanagnou: Professor of Emergency Medicine and Associate Provost for Faculty Development 
  • Moderator: Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel: Director of the Creativity Core Curriculum and MS in Health Communication Design

April 21, 2023

In honor of the United Nations World Creativity and Innovation Day, students enjoyed a variety of experiences designed to explore the relationship of the physical senses to human creativity. Creativity Fair activities included chair yoga, digital music composition, popcorn tasting, custom fidget creation, tea blending, color theory, and experimental drawing.

March 22, 2023

When prototyping, it doesn’t matter what you (or anyone else) thinks is possible, only what you can make possible in that moment. While we live in a world of limitless wonder and possibility, our unconscious biases often stricture us— preventing us from seeing potential hiding in plain view. Working with one’s own hands quickly unravels the myths of the biases.

For the past decade, Kelli Anderson has used paper engineering to seek out incredible possibilities hiding in plain view in our world and it has completely upended how she thinks about craft vs tech. Even the most ubiquitous, low-tech materials behave structurally and can reveal amazing facets of our reality. Humble paper can act as a direct interface on sound, light, and time; making these abstractions tangible and accessible. This is because these radically minimalist structures still behave in concert with the physical and social forces which structure our world. With no hidden parts, a piece of paper can act as a direct interface on sound, light, and time; making these abstractions tangible and accessible, in a way that more black-box tech obscures.

This talk will focus on recent paper engineering experience and work-in-progress—in particular, Alphabet in Motion: A Pop-up Book for Typophiles, an interactive pop-up book about sound, and Paper as Interface. I will also discuss This Book is a Planetarium (which contains a working planetarium) and This Book is a Camera acts (which contains a working camera.)

Kelli Anderson is an artist, designer, animator, and tinkerer who pushes the limits of ordinary materials to seek out possibilities hidden in plain view. Her books and projects have included a pop-up paper planetarium, a book that transforms into a pinhole camera, a working paper record player, and techniques for misusing the RISO to create animations. Intentionally lo-fi, she believes that humble materials can provide entry into the endless, tunneling complexity of our world, making those wonders accessible on a multi-sensory, rich, human level. These projects confront our sense of possibility, which has been artificially-circumscribed by the dominance and black-boxness of tech. She is currently completing writing Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book on the relationship between typography and technology with Letterform Archive.

April 21, 2022

For the second time, Drexel, Thomas Jefferson University and University of the Arts have joined forces to celebrate the United Nations World Creativity and Innovation Day on April 21, 2022 with an evening of Pecha Kucha* presentations showcasing the power of creativity and collaboration to improve the human condition! 

*The Pecha Kucha format requires short, high-energy presentations from participants in the form of 20 slides with 20 seconds of time dedicated to each slide.

April 21, 2022

For the second time, Drexel, Thomas Jefferson University and University of the Arts have joined forces to celebrate the United Nations World Creativity and Innovation Day on April 21, 2022 with an evening of Pecha Kucha* presentations showcasing the power of creativity and collaboration to improve the human condition! 

*The Pecha Kucha format requires short, high-energy presentations from participants in the form of 20 slides with 20 seconds of time dedicated to each slide.