BloomCon26 Online Speaker Series!
For anyone, and especially for those who were unable to attend the live event, an online BloomCon26 speaker series was offered October 16- 18, with recorded sessions available at any time.
In alignment with Bright Insight’s commitment to accessibility, this series is available on a pay-what-you-can-if-you-can basis, with a donation of any amount.
If you could not attend at the time of the live events, no worries! Recoded sessions are available below!
Live, Recorded Sessions
Whether 8 years old or 80 when your exceptionality is identified, it sometimes feels impossible to achieve to your maximum potential. People assume gifted label or “diagnosis” will make life easier, but what often ends up happening is that we are expected(by others and ourselves) to be perfect and do ALL THE THINGS. Giftedness is seen in a vacuum, independent of other things that impact ability. In this Online session, we will discuss how intersectionality (disability, gender, race, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, trauma) can impact exceptionality AND how to navigate your own expectations when you feel like you’re not reaching your full potential.
What if giftedness isn't a privilege marker, but a community resource? Nth Bar-Fields challenges the assumption that intellectual giftedness belongs primarily to well-resourced, majority populations — arguing instead that it goes catastrophically unrecognized in BIPOC, low-income, and otherwise marginalized communities, where it's too often filtered out by systems never built to see it. Drawing on years of grant-funded social venture work and a nexialist's ability to connect across disciplines, Nth reframes giftedness identification as an equity issue: not just who gets support, but what talent entire communities lose when it stays invisible.
Forms are mutable: bodies die, capacities fluctuate, identities and cultures shift, scientific paradigms overturn, and civilizations rise and fall. Yet consciousness persists in its effort to know itself through relationship—with others, with its environment, and through its own evolving capacities. Form changes at uneven rates and in different directions, while awareness appears to continue across those changes. This suggests that we inherit unfinished questions and participate in extending awareness itself. Meaning may not be confined to a single life, and identity may be less bounded than it appears. We act as embodied positions within shared spatial and temporal systems, but awareness itself is not reducible to any single form. It is the ground from which forms arise and through which they are experienced. Philosophically, the body can be understood as a receptive point through which the world becomes available—space, time, depth, and resistance appear from a situated perspective. But consciousness also exists in the shared field between perspectives. There is the object of knowledge and the act of knowing, and consciousness mediates the difference between them. Others perceive and attend to aspects of reality inaccessible from one subjective position alone. In that relational variance between minds, new aspects of reality become visible that would not exist in isolation. This raises the possibility that consciousness is not only shaped by evolution but participates in its unfolding. Individual minds may be expressions of a deeper continuity, like flowers emerging from a shared root system. What appears as separateness may instead be differentiation within an underlying continuity that makes collective awareness and shared meaning possible. This view does not deny the reality of the external world. It situates it within a larger context in which consciousness and form are mutually involved in an ongoing process of emergence and discovery.
Gifted individuals often see through society’s thin veneer of meaning and ask “What’s the point?” What do you do when your questions make people’s heads spin and existential depression is a constant companion? Try asking existential philosophers. That’s what Youssef did. Follow this consultant for gifted adults on a walk through the dark with Camus, Nietzsche, Zapffe, Yalom, and Schopenhauer to see how they bridge the gap of meaning.
Pre-Recoded Video Sessions
High-achieving, twice-exceptional women often become extraordinarily good at appearing fine — and extraordinarily isolated in the process. Nicole Weber, who has built and rebuilt multiple careers across continents, from corporate leadership to trauma therapy, examines the gap between external competence and internal experience for gifted and 2E women. Drawing on her own neurodivergent lived experience and her clinical work in hypnosis and trauma, she explores how masking and chronic over-functioning create a particular kind of existential loneliness — one that looks like success from the outside and can feel like invisibility from within.
Nicole Weber is a twice-exceptional (2E) author, speaker, and interdisciplinary practitioner whose career spans social sciences, hypnosis, traumatherapy, high-level performance, and executive strategy. Before relocating to the U.S., she ran a trauma-focused hypnotherapy practice in Germany and previously served as a Vice President at Hannover Re. She is the creator of Equihypnosis®, working with equestrians and their horses across disciplines. As a neurodivergent woman who has built multiple careers, she explores masking, over-functioning, and the structural loneliness that can accompany high cognitive intensity.
Why do twice-exceptional and LGBTQIA+ identities show up together so often? Rhya Krellwitz — identified as gifted young, then formally diagnosed with ADHD and informally with autism after burning out during the pandemic — brings both lived experience and genuine curiosity to this question. Drawing on personal reflection and a wider interest in the research, Rhya explores possible explanations for the overlap between neurodivergent-gifted and queer identities: shared experiences of masking, difference, and self-discovery. This session is an invitation to untangle the threads together, for anyone who's noticed the pattern in their own life or community.
Rhya, known to many in conference spaces as Caleb, was identified as gifted early and excelled academically until experiencing burnout during the pandemic. Since then, Rhya has been formally diagnosed with ADHD and informally with autism. After attending SENG 2023, Rhya found a sense of belonging and returned in 2024 and for BloomCon 2025. With a strong interest in understanding twice-exceptionality, Rhya hopes to become a counselor supporting 2E teens and young adults.
Twice-exceptional adults often carry a level of intensity that standard wellness advice was never built for. In this session, Summer Esquerre introduces the Intensity Map, a somatic tool for identifying what drains your energy, what actually supports your capacity, and what needs to change to make room for both. Using the ART framework — Awareness, Recognition, and Tailoring — Summer guides participants toward practical, body-based strategies for protecting their energy and setting boundaries that fit who they really are. Grounded in nervous-system awareness, this is fortification you can put into practice immediately, not abstract theory.
Summer Esquerre is the co-founder of SMART Wellness and a somatic leadership coach. She supports high-achieving professionals through a lens shaped by Black queer and twice-exceptional lived experience. Her work brings the SMART Wellness Framework into practical application, helping people protect their energy, set boundaries, and build support that aligns with who they are, while guiding organizations to create conditions where gifted and intense individuals can thrive without burnout.
For many gifted and twice-exceptional adults, conversing with an LLM can feel different — faster, more patient, less socially costly than talking with people. But what does that actually mean? In this workshop, Ashley Khor draws on her PhD research in public policy and AI to explore how large language models are reshaping cognition, connection, and risk for neurodivergent and 2e individuals. Participants will examine where these tools offer real support — reflection, processing, reduced friction — and where they introduce new vulnerabilities, from over-reliance to isolation, grounded in both technical understanding and lived experience.
Ashley Khor is a PhD candidate in public policy and AI focused on translating responsible AI into practice. With over a decade in applied data science and public-sector innovation, she studies how generative AI operates in high-stakes, real-world settings, especially within social impact organizations. Her work emphasizes sociotechnical approaches that integrate technical capability with human values, lived experience, and institutional constraints. She brings a sustained interest in cognitive diversity, exploring how large language models may shape connection, reflection, and risk for neurodivergent and twice-exceptional (2e) individuals.
Labels can be useful shorthand — and they can also flatten a person into something far simpler than who they actually are. Drawing on her background as a scientist and her experience parenting twice-exceptional emerging adults, Erin Krellwitz explores the space between the diagnostic or identity labels people carry and the full, layered reality underneath them. This session digs into why complex identities so often get compressed into single words, what gets lost in that compression, and how to hold both the usefulness of labels and the fuller truth of the person wearing them — for yourself or for someone you support.
Erin Krellwitz earned a PhD in botany at Duke University, developed science education materials for Carolina Biological Supply, and assisted a photographer in his small business. Erin is parenting twice-exceptional (2e) emerging adults in a complicated world. She brings that experience to her work as a life coach with a focus on neurodiversity and a love for helping people figure out what they want in their life. Learn more about Erin at mossandmaplecoaching.com!
Most workplace friction isn't about ability — it's about misunderstanding how people actually think, communicate, and work best. Erica Chen and Jeff Gibbard introduce their "User Guide" framework, a practical tool for articulating your own needs, preferences, and working style so teammates don't have to guess. Drawing on Jeff's lived experience as a neurodivergent entrepreneur and Erica's background in leadership and culture strategy, this session walks neurodiverse teams through building personal user guides that foster clarity, empathy, and more inclusive collaboration — turning "how we're different" into something teams can actually work with.
Erica Chen is a leadership speaker, community strategist, and co-founder of Super Impactful, where she supports the development of self-aware, human-centered cultures. Drawing from 15 years in corporate environments, including WeWork, Groupon, and Bank of America, alongside her work with mothers and first- and second-generation women, she examines how inherited narratives shape identity, burnout, and leadership. Her framework, Pivot & Shimmy, integrates storytelling with practical tools to support meaningful, aligned shifts. As founder of Unicorn Dynasty, she creates spaces where lived experience, healing, and leadership intersect.
Jeff Gibbard, a neurodivergent author, entrepreneur, and speaker, focuses on helping individuals and teams deepen self-awareness, improve communication, and build more effective, aligned systems. Together with Erica Chen, he integrates lived experience with practical tools, supporting organizations in developing cultures rooted in clarity, inclusion, and connection. Their work centers on helping people understand how they think, relate, and lead, creating environments where individuals and teams can engage more authentically and function more effectively.
This session is for the people who don’t see themselves in gifted spaces because the image of giftedness they’ve been shown doesn’t look like them. I’m one of them, still becoming someone who believes she belongs, and I think that process is worth talking about out loud. Together we’ll explore invisible giftedness: giftedness that survived instead of flourished, showing up as complexity, intensity, and depth more than credentials or achievement. We’ll look at how undiagnosed neurodivergence can mask and distort giftedness across a lifetime, how late identification rewrites your history, the exhaustion of being too much for most conversations and not enough for conventional systems, the tangle of perfectionism, trauma, and giftedness, and what it means to reach midlife without having made it by society’s measures. I bring no polished brand or bestselling book, just 50+ years of navigating a mind that works differently and hard-won clarity about what that has cost and made possible. If that’s you: you are not the ugly redheaded stepchild of giftedness. You are the part of giftedness that hasn’t been seen yet.
Cindy spent most of her life being difficult to categorize. An opera-trained singer (MMus, UBC), she worked in government, ran a voice studio for twenty years, facilitated women’s circles, and held senior administrative roles, approximately none of it in a straight line. Identified as gifted in childhood, she was diagnosed with ADHD in midlife (“cougar puberty,” she calls it) and later recognized her autistic traits. She created The UnDiva, a practice joining voice, embodied knowing, and authentic expression, and contributed “Elemental Healing” to InterGifted’s How I Healed My Gifted Trauma (2025). She lives in Edmonton and is still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up.
Studying giftedness for a living means encountering plenty of absurdity along the way — and Dr. James Bishop has collected the best of it. In this talk, he bridges outdated pathology-based paradigms with a more current, developmental understanding of what giftedness actually is, using humor as the entry point rather than the footnote. Drawing on years as an educational psychologist and licensed counselor working with gifted individuals, James shares the funniest, most human moments from his research and practice, using them to illuminate real insights about how bright minds actually develop, struggle, and thrive.
James Bishop developed an interest in giftedness after watching a film about martial artist Bruce Lee. But after several years of studying martial arts and getting kicked in the head repeatedly, Bishop decided that what he really admired about Lee was his brilliant mind. This realization led him to leave the fighting cage and pursue graduate study in counseling, followed by a PhD in educational psychology with a focus on giftedness and talent. Dr. Bishop is an educational psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and author whose work focuses on the social and emotional development of gifted individuals.
What happens when giftedness, trauma, ADHD, and autism all show up in the same person at once? Mattia Maurée explores that paradox from the inside out — as someone whose early identification as gifted masked autism and ADHD discoveries until adulthood, and whose interest in trauma healing became the foundation of their coaching work. Drawing on both lived experience and years spent supporting other AuDHD and gifted adults, this session sits with the contradictions rather than resolving them: how competence and struggle, brilliance and burnout, can coexist in one person, and what it means to build a life that holds all of it.
Mattia Maurée is a composer, writer, coach, and host of the AuDHD Flourishing podcast. They were identified as gifted young, which masked the autism and ADHD discoveries until adulthood. An interest in trauma healing led to trainings that eventually informed everything in their work. While Mattia was able to graduate from college as a teen thanks to a program at the University of Washington, they struggled with the transition to independent adult life. Messy emergence from those struggles evolved into their current business coaching other AuDHD (and potentially gifted) folks with creative goals and building a life that works.
For many neurodivergent adults, feeding themselves is far more complicated than "eat the right foods." Christine Sasse draws on three decades as a registered dietitian — and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent woman — to unpack how sensory sensitivities, executive function challenges, and food-related shame quietly shape our relationship with eating. Rather than another list of rules, this session offers a gentler lens: practical, lower-stress strategies for nourishing a brain that doesn't always cooperate with conventional nutrition advice, built from real clinical experience and honest self-reflection.
Christine Sasse, RD, brings over 30 years of experience in nutrition alongside her lived experience as a neurodivergent woman. Her work spans medical nutrition therapy, public health, early childhood wellness, and university-level curriculum development. A self-described "reformed picky eater," she explores how sensory processing, executive function, and shame shape eating experiences, offering practical, lower-stress approaches to nourishment for neurodivergent adults.
What if neurodivergent perception isn't a deficit to accommodate, but a way of seeing that can actually stitch fragmented systems back together? Sher Griffin draws on years of transformative justice work and the Kaleidoscope Systems framework to reframe cognitive difference as a form of bridge-building capacity. This session explores how neurodivergent ways of processing — pattern recognition across silos, tolerance for complexity, resistance to false either/or thinking — can help repair the disconnection between communities, disciplines, and worldviews that mainstream systems keep pulling apart. Expect complexity honored, not simplified.
Sher is a neuroqueer systems thinker, transformative educator, writer, and community builder working at the intersections of autism, ADHD, giftedness, and trauma. With over seven years in transformative justice, she centers complexity, accessibility, and anti-capitalist frameworks. She is the creator of Kaleidoscope Systems, a dynamic ecosystem of public scholarship, mutual aid, and radical pedagogy. Through peer support, her Substack (The Cognitive Ecologist), community education, and ongoing PhD research in interdisciplinary systems, Sher's work is grounded in relational ethics, disability justice, and a commitment to collective liberation through multiple entry points.
We will present the latest research findings from the international study examining the prevalence of overexcitabilities in highly—profoundly gifted children and adolescents. The findings will be contextualized through examples from the research. Dabrowski’s human development theory will be incorporated to examine the distinct development and developmental potential found in individuals experiencing multiple high overexcitabilities. Finally, a parent’s journey to better understanding greater—than—typical sensitivities, intensities, and awareness will be shared along with helpful insights and recommendations.
Vanessa R. Wood, Psy.D., M.A. Gifted Ed, is Co-Founder, President-CEO, and Research Principal Investigator of the International Gifted Consortium and its Research Center for Highly–Profoundly Gifted. She co-authored the 2024 international mixed-methods study on overexcitabilities in highly and profoundly gifted youth with the University of Antwerp and the 2020 literature review on their psychological development. Dr. Wood also co-edited Highly–Profoundly Gifted: Universal Understandings and Holistic Approaches and develops programs, trains professionals, and consults on gifted development.
Meet your host, Dr. Patty Gently!
Gentle Heretic and Bright Insight Information & Institutional Memory Steward, Dr. Patty Gently, is a developmental psychologist, therapeutic mentor, and author supporting gifted and neurodivergent adults. She co-founded Bright Insight Support Network in 2018. Dr. Gently is the author of Intersection of Intensity: Exploring Giftedness and Trauma (2024, Gifted Unlimited), with a second book, Hyperneuroplastic: Beyond Gifted Neurodivergence, currently in development. She is the originator of the HNP (Hyperneuroplasticity) and GEAR frameworks, drawing on nonlinear dynamical systems theory and Dąbrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration to explore giftedness, trauma, and neurodivergence as interconnected.
