(Un)Common Threads 2026: Creativity & Innovation Summit

For the Love of the Game: Creativity requires curiosity, adaptability, and the willingness to keep showing up for the work.

November 5, 2026
8:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Sheraton Hotel, St. John's, NL

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Join us at (Un)Common Threads: Creativity & Innovation Summit 2026 for a half-day of inspiring conversations, meaningful perspectives, and new ideas exploring sustainability in career, creative, and personal growth.

This year’s Summit, For the Love of the Game, explores what it means to stay connected to your work as industries evolve, technologies shift, and the world changes around us. Across disciplines, our speakers reflect on the ongoing relationship between creator and craft, and the curiosity, resilience, and adaptability required to sustain meaningful work over time.

Bringing together acclaimed leaders from across entertainment, interactive media, and other visionary industries, this year’s Summit bridges perspectives from performance, storytelling, technology, and design, and asks what allows people not only to sustain creative practice, but to remain deeply connected to it - a conversation about endurance, experimentation, leadership, and the ongoing decision to stay in the game.

Featured Speakers

Rob Bridgett
Senior Audio Director (PlayStation, Activision, Square Enix, Vivendi Universal)

Levelling up: a conversation about maintaining your creative voice as your industry changes.

Mary Walsh
Nationally renowned actor, writer, comedian, activist and mother

Changing the Game: on fearlessness, trusting your instincts, and doing the work.

Emad Rizkalla
CEO of Bluedrop, Serial Entrepreneur

Curiosity That Never Sleeps: Innovation, Technology, and the Future of Work

Featured Artists and Performers

Hadiza Bello
Visual artist

Presented with support from the
Marlowe Foundation

Nora de Mariaffi
Artist, Seamstress, & Arts worker

Presented with support from the
Marlowe Foundation

Ashley and Julie Dicker
Performers

Presented with support from the
Marlowe Foundation

Sherry Ryan
Musician and Songwriter

Presented with support from the
Marlowe Foundation

Julie Lewis
Artist, Educator, Creative director, Founder of SassyTuna Studio

Presented with support from the
Marlowe Foundation

Why Attend

(Un)Common Threads brings together leaders from business, technology, arts and culture, marketing, education, film and television, design, and entrepreneurship for an unforgettable day of professional development, networking, and creative exchange.

This conversation explores longevity, adaptation and curiosity.

How do we continue to evolve without losing what matters?
How do we stay engaged as our fields transform?
What does it mean to keep choosing the work, again and again?

This is a space for real-time inspiration.

Expect:

Joyful, interactive moments that pull you out of your routine
Meaningful networking across industries
Creativity in action: creative experiences woven throughout
New tools, insights, and energy to bring back to your teams and communities
Opportunities to explore big ideas and apply them right away

Let’s do something (Un)Common together

Join us to connect with others, gain new tools, and reimagine what’s possible.

Register Now

Rob Bridgett

Title: Levelling up: a conversation about maintaining your creative voice as your industry changes.

Rob Bridgett is an award-winning audio director, writer, and creative leader with more than 25 years of experience in the video games industry.

After studying cinema at the University of Derby in 1993, Rob went on to become one of the first graduates of Bournemouth University's pioneering Master's programme in ‘Sound Design for the Moving Image’.

Relocating to Canada in 2003, Rob has built an international career as a senior audio director, working for leading studios including PlayStation, Square Enix, Activision Blizzard, and Vivendi Universal.

Alongside work in game development, Bridgett has become an advocate for the creative use of sound in interactive media, and is the author of seven books, including ‘The Game Audio Director's Guide’ (2026), ‘Working with Sound’ (2023), and ‘Leading with Sound’ (2021), all published by Routledge.

Mary Walsh

Title: Changing the Game: on fearlessness, trusting your instincts, and doing the work.

Mary Walsh created and starred in This Hour Has 22 Minutes, CBC’s wildly popular take on current affairs. The series earned her many of her numerous Gemini awards and showcased her dynamic range of characters, including the flagrantly outspoken ‘Marg Delahunty’.

Walsh wrote, produced and starred in the Gemini award winning series Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, which returned to CBC in 2017 as a feature length presentation called A Christmas Fury, with Walsh and the original cast reprising their roles. In 2017 she released her debut novel, a Canadian best-seller, Crying For The Moon. She currently writes, directs and stars in The Missus Downstairs, for which she has been nominated for multiple Canadian Screen Awards.

Walsh’s recent TV credits include recurring roles on MGM’s The Institute, Syfy’s Resident Alien, CBC’s Hudson & Rex, and Little Dog, for which she was nominated for a 2020 Canadian Screen Award, as well as numerous guest appearances on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

Select feature film credits include The Grand Seduction and Closet Monster (Official selections at TIFF 2014 and 2015, respectively), Mambo Italiano, Happy Place (dir. Helen Shaver), for which she won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2021, Deaner ’89 (alongside Paul Spence, Will Sasso, and Kevin McDonald), and Dancing On The Elephant (alongside Sheila McCarthy), for which she won the 2025 Joan Orenstein Award for Outstanding Performance at the Atlantic International Film Festival.

Outside of the film, TV and theatre world, Mary is an outspoken advocate for mental health and addiction awareness as a spokesperson for Bell Let’s Talk. She’s a staunch supporter of the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health in Ottawa, and lends her time and voice to the CNIB, St. Joseph’s Hospital and CAMH.

Among her many awards and doctorates, Mary is the recipient of the Order of Canada, the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Performing Arts, and the CSA’s Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement in television acting.

Emad Rizkalla

Title: Curiosity That Never Sleeps: Innovation, Technology, and the Future of Work

Emad Rizkalla is a serial entrepreneur. He writes and speaks extensively on human capital, innovation, and the evolving needs of the workforce, and advises governments in Canada and abroad on these critical topics. He provides unflinching analysis on the profound, urgent shifts the AI revolution will bring to small businesses and the workforce.

Emad founded Memorial’s first tech startup before he graduated in 1992 to commercialize his Term 8 mechanical engineering design project. That student company spawned several other companies which now employ over 800 people and remain headquartered in Newfoundland & Labrador. Bluedrop was spun out in 2004 and is widely recognized as a learning technology trailblazer with key offices in St. John’s, Halifax, and Orlando.

Before he was 30, Emad was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40 and was featured in a TIME magazine cover story showcasing “young dynamic entrepreneurs who will create the 21st Century.” (More than one person has quipped: he may have been in TIME, but he is never on time.) In 1998, his company created the hardware control systems for the first experiment from Newfoundland to fly aboard a NASA space shuttle.

Though he was arguably unemployable in 1992, Emad has since chaired or sat on multiple federal, corporate, and multi-stakeholder task forces and boards of directors. He was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013. He currently sits on the board of directors for the Terry Fox Foundation. He is Memorial University’s Alumni of the Year for 2025.

He loves to laugh (even at times he really shouldn’t) and has an unhealthy obsession with palm trees.

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