PINC 2025 Was a Reminder of the Power of Human Connection
The most creative weekend in Sarasota returned for a sold-out conference, outdoor dinner and a Saturday festival featuring murals, BMX, a holiday market, food and toy drives, and more.
Nearly 2,000 people attended the 11th annual PINC Experience the weekend of Dec. 11-13—a three-day extravaganza celebrating creativity in Sarasota. Anand Pallegar, the founder of DreamLarge and the owner of Sarasota Magazine, brought PINC (an acronym for people, ideas, nature and community) to Sarasota from the Netherlands to create conversations, spark innovation, deepen human connection and showcase Sarasota as a capital of creativity.
What began as a single day of talks 11 years ago has now grown into a multi-day event. This year, PINC brought in 11 speakers from around the world to talk about their inspirations and innovative work to make the world a better place. Held at the Sarasota Opera House, presenters spoke about protecting the earth’s rarest sources of pigment, the science behind finding purpose, protecting children from AI and showing them the joy in real-life human connection, the importance of caring for forgotten gravestones, how to make homes more disaster resilient and even how to sculpt cheese—a presentation by the greatest-ever cheese sculptor.
As attendees filed out of the opera house, they were greeted with Champagne and outrageously creative cakes—each designed to represent a speaker’s topic—for a whimsical post-show reception. The event continued with the PINC Afterparty at The Sarasota Modern.
The next day brought people together for the PINC Ideas Dinner, an outdoor dinner party held under the stars for 150 people; and the following day was the free PINCfest at the Rosemary Art & Design District, featuring live mural painting, a holiday market, food, a skate ramp, face painting and a toy drive.
Keep scrolling for more photos from this year’s festivities.
Thursday, Dec. 11
PINC Experience
Ringling College students head to the Sarasota Opera House for PINC.
Sarasota Magazine’s Dan Starostecki high-fives attendees on their way into the opera house
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DreamLarge founder and Sarasota Magazine CEO Anand Pallegar takes the stage to kick off the conference.
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DJ Ricky Rick gets the crowd pumped.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Imran Ahmed, CEO, Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization confronting online hate, misinformation and extremism worldwide. A recognized authority on the psychology of social media and the spread of conspiracy movements, he advises global policymakers, technology companies, and civic leaders on how to make digital spaces safer and more truthful.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Danielle Todd, the founder and executive director of Michigan’s Make Food Not Waste, has built a statewide platform for sustainability by opening two upcycling kitchens, creating Every Bit Counts, and leading campaigns to cut food waste in half by 2030. She works with households, restaurants, and policymakers to change habits and systems alike, turning surplus food into nutritious meals and opportunity.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Armen Hratchian leads Teach For America Detroit and the TeachMichigan initiative, a $120 million partnership designed to identify, train and support Michigan educators. Since taking the helm in 2018, Hratchian has grown the organization from 30 teachers to over 800 and increased annual revenue from $500,000 to $16 million.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Alison Cariens serves as conservation coordinator and curatorial technician for the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard Art Museums, home to the renowned Forbes Pigment Collection. The collection holds more than 10,000 pigment samples that chronicle the evolution of human creativity, from crushed minerals and insects to the earliest synthetic dyes. Cariens preserves, catalogs, and studies these materials to reveal what color tells us about history, technology, and the human impulse to create beauty.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Andrew Lumish is known around the world as the “Good Cemetarian” for his remarkable work restoring neglected graves and uncovering the stories of the people they memorialize. Through his nonprofit, The Good Cemetarian Project, he has cleaned and restored thousands of headstones belonging to veterans and ordinary citizens whose legacies had been lost to time.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Eisha Buch leads Common Sense Media’s K–12 Digital Citizenship Program, a free curriculum used in more than 85,000 schools around the world. With 15 years in education as a teacher, administrator, and learning strategist, she helps students and educators navigate technology’s influence on relationships, well-being and civic engagement
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Image: Nicole Moriarity
Known to fans around the country as “the Cheese Lady,” Sarah Kaufmann transforms ordinary wheels of cheddar and gouda into extraordinary works of edible art. For nearly 30 years, she has toured the nation creating whimsical sculptures—alligators, aircraft carriers, entire football stadiums—while holding multiple Guinness World Records for her craft.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Aaron Hurst is a social entrepreneur and author whose career is focused on human connection. As founder and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Connection, Hurst addresses the erosion of social trust by helping communities, companies and leaders rebuild relational bonds.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Dr. Zack Almquist is a computational sociologist and statistician whose research uses data to understand and solve complex social challenges including homelessness, disaster response and housing instability. An associate professor at the University of Washington and former research scientist at Meta, Almquist specializes in mapping human behavior through data networks to reveal how communities connect and adapt.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Dr. Alison Thompson is the founder of Third Wave Volunteers, an organization dedicated to serving communities in crisis. For more than 25 years, she has worked on the front lines of disaster zones across the world, from Syria and Ukraine to Haiti and the aftermath of last year’s hurricanes here in Florida.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Juan Caballero is an architect, engineer and humanitarian dedicated to building safer housing in disaster-prone regions. As CEO of Build Change, he leads teams across Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia in transforming how communities recover and prepare for future disasters
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Image: Nicole Moriarity
A beet cake inspired by PINC speaker Danielle Todd’s work with her organization Make Food Not Waste.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Friday, Dec. 12
PINC Ideas Dinner
Rapt attendees at the PINC Ideas dinner in the Rosemary District on Friday, Dec. 12.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
The long table at the PINC Ideas dinner.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Guests enjoy dinner catered by Michael’s On East at the long table in the Rosemary District.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
Saturday, Dec. 13
PINCfest
A BMX biker gets some air at PINCfest in the Rosemary District on Saturday, features new murals, a holiday market, Artist Alley, live music, a toy drive benefitting SPARCC, a food drive supporting local families and more, hosted by DreamLarge and Project Pride.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
More jaw-dropping BMX stunts.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
A mural by Swirly Painter.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
A mural by artist Zulu.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
A mural by artist Esh.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
A mural by artist Chris Dyer.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
PINCfest attendees in front of a mural by Joey Salamon.
Image: Nicole Moriarity
