Lately, we’ve been reflecting on the industry: navigating uncertainty, exploring personal projects and indie paths, pivoting your skills to new and unexpected areas, and betting on yourself to grow from creator to creative business. 

We are (once again) living through tough, uncertain times, and I can’t tell you how much dread I feel writing these words. But instead of asking the universe when we'll finally catch a break, maybe the better question is: what do we do while we're in it?

Our mission of supporting the creative community remains. This means countless hours of work talking to Tribe members, understanding the market, and crafting solutions that bring the community, companies, and supporting entities together. You can be an active part of these discussions and help shape the industry with us: there are ongoing conversations on our Platform, where we promote career opportunities, connect you with expert mentors, and host digital events.

As the industry changes, so do we, in an evolving dance where we find our rhythm as we go.

The Main Event this year will reflect that, with many changes on the way. The speakers are the biggest indicators of where we’re headed, revealing new territories and unexpected fields. They’re not obvious fits for the Main Event, and that’s exactly why they’re so important. 

Take Dr. Adam Gazzaley, for example: neuroscientist, neurologist, inventor, author, photographer, and entrepreneur. He leads the design and development of novel brain assessment and cognitive optimization technologies to advance education, wellness, and medicine practices at Neuroscape. Neuroscape’s novel approach involves the development of custom-designed, closed-loop video games integrated with the latest advancements in software and hardware (virtual/augmented reality, motion capture, mobile physiological recording devices, transcranial electrical brain stimulation). These technologies are then advanced to rigorous, placebo-controlled research studies that evaluate their impact on cognition, as well as the neural mechanisms of these effects using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

Together with confirmed Knight @Matt Omernick, he also co-founded Akili, a company developing therapeutic video games, on Fast Company’s 2022 list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. 

To represent the entrepreneurial mind and the business side of things, we invited Claude Bordeleau, an entrepreneur, investor, and creative executive whose work focuses on building sustainable studios at scale and aligning creative excellence with disciplined execution, healthy leadership, and long-term value creation. He’s the founder and CEO of AMPERA, a next-generation game development studio backed by experienced operators and long-term capital. 

We’re also reinforcing our bet on sound. Leff Lefferts is a Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer, & Re-Recording Mixer at Skywalker Sound. The Oscar-nominated artist is passionate about storytelling through sound, getting his start in music before shifting into film and earning his first feature credit on Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Since then, he’s worked on over 100 projects at Skywalker Sound, including The Revenant, The Wild Robot, How to Train Your Dragon, Say Hey, Willie Mays, Thriller 40, McCartney 3,2,1, and Carne y Arena. On the composition side, we have Fabrizio Mancinelli: composer, songwriter, and conductor whose work has been produced for Paramount, Disney, Universal, Rai Cinema, Netflix, and other major studios. His most recent score is Here After (Paramount, 2024), and in 2022, he wrote the original music and lyrics for the musical feature The Land of Dreams. 

And then, we take a sharp turn from scores to skin, welcoming CROM to the lineup, an artist specializing in books, games, tattooing, and necromancy, among other things. No need to read the last sentence again: we did write necromancy. Yes, the ancient practice of magic that involves communicating with the dead. 

We are bringing different fields together so they can intersect, collide, and create breakthroughs out of this friction. What other event has a neurologist, a conductor, and a tattooist on the lineup? We still have many names left to confirm, but rest assured: you are in for the most unexpected six-day ride, with perspectives from places you weren’t even looking. 
 

Tickets for THU2026 are still available, and you can pay in installments at no extra charge.