Welcome to In Her Words, New York Festivals Lady Liberty’s monthly interview series celebrating women innovators across the industry. As part of the Lady Liberty Leadership Program, the series offers audiences an opportunity to connect with the voices, ideas, and experiences shaping today’s creative landscape through thoughtful conversations, personal reflections, and an evolving monthly focus.
Meet Susan Perlbachs, Chief Creative Officer at EVERSANA INTOUCH.
Susan Perlbachs is known for pushing health and pharma work into the cultural mainstream through bold storytelling, insight-driven strategy, and breakthrough creativity. With more than 20 years of experience across healthcare, marketing and digital, she has led global and US launches in nearly every major therapeutic area for professional, DTC, and DTP audiences. Susan earned a BA in diplomacy and world affairs and has been named one of PharmaVOICE magazine’s Top 100 Most Inspiring People in Life Sciences.
Lady Liberty: What’s something about you that isn’t widely known, but really shapes who you are or what drives you?
Susan Perlbachs: One thing people may not know is that my path to healthcare advertising wasn't exactly linear. I started in consumer advertising, spent time working on film sets and earned my Writers Guild card, and eventually found my way into healthcare.
Long before leadership roles, organizational responsibilities, and quarterly business reviews, I was fascinated by storytelling itself: why people believe what they believe, what moves them, and how stories shape behavior.
That's ultimately what drew me to healthcare and what has kept me here for most of my career. On the surface, it's about science. But underneath, it's about deeply human moments: fear, hope, uncertainty, resilience, and identity. I've always been drawn to the intersection of rigorous thinking and emotional truth.
I'm also endlessly interested in questions that don't have clean answers. What do we owe each other? How do we balance innovation, access, truth, and commercial reality? And increasingly, who gets to decide what is true? Those questions show up in the work I admire, the ideas I pursue, and even the stories I want to write.
Lady Liberty: What does creativity mean to you today, personally, and professionally?
Susan Perlbachs: Today, creativity is less about making things and more about creating meaning.
For most of my career, creativity was often defined by execution: the campaign, the headline, the film, the visual. Those things still matter tremendously. But in a world where content is abundant and increasingly easy to produce, attention becomes the scarce resource.
Personally, creativity starts with curiosity. It's connecting seemingly unrelated ideas, finding patterns others miss, and asking better questions.
Professionally, creativity is the ability to transform information into understanding, and understanding into action. Especially in healthcare. We don't have the luxury of creating work that is merely entertaining. The work has to matter. It has to help someone understand a disease, seek treatment, change a behavior, or feel seen in a way they didn't before.
The most exciting creative challenge today isn't how to make more content. It's how to make something people genuinely care about.
Lady Liberty: How is AI changing the way you approach creativity? And where do you draw the line between it as a tool and your own creative thinking?
Susan Perbachs: AI has dramatically expanded what's possible. It removes friction, accelerates exploration, and allows us to prototype ideas at a speed that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
But it's also made me more convinced of what creativity actually is.
I don't believe creativity is the production of content. If it were, AI would have already won. Creativity is judgment. It's taste. It's empathy. It's knowing which idea matters, which story resonates, which tension is worth exploring, and what human truth sits underneath the data.
AI helps me visualize, research, and build. But it doesn't tell me what is worth saying. AI can generate answers, but humans still have to decide which questions are worth asking and which outputs will actually matter to people.
As AI makes content cheaper, human judgment becomes more valuable. That's why I don't see AI as replacing creativity. I see it increasing the value of the most human parts of the creative process: curiosity, empathy, imagination, and the ability to recognize an insight when everyone else is looking at the same information.
Those are the qualities that create meaning. And they're still profoundly human.