The North Fork Sun’s 2025 Person of the Year: Paul Kreiling

Paul Kreiling has always been a man on the move.

As a kid growing up on Luptons Point in Mattituck, he would walk from the bay to the Sound and back through open potato fields. Today, he is a skilled rigger and lifelong sailor, a graphic designer whose logos are stitched into the DNA of the local sailboat racing scene and the creative force driving a multimillion-dollar campaign to save one of the North Fork’s most visible landmarks.

For most of the last decade, that has been the rhythm of his life: boats and artwork, museum exhibits and capital campaigns, all orbiting around Greenport Harbor and Bug Light. He’s also a longtime supporter of the North Fork Audubon Society with a legendary eye for avians and captain of a sailboat charter based out of Safe Harbor marina.

That breadth of passions — and the energy that powers it — is why Kreiling is the North Fork Sun’s 2025 Person of the Year.

One day at the East End Seaport Museum and Marine Foundation, an educational program for local elementary school students was on the verge of being canceled because the presenter couldn’t make it at the last minute, according to museum board member Karen Sauvigne. Urgently, the head of the museum’s education committee called Kreiling. “’Can you think of anything to do?’

“Paul dropped what he was doing — a yoga class, I think — and showed up at the museum with a bunch of materials and taught the kids knot-tying,” Sauvigne said. “He can just pull this stuff out of nowhere.”

Sauvigne, who has worked closely with Kreiling at the museum and crewed on his and wife Peggy Lauber’s boat, Yikes, said the moment captures who he is.

“Paul is a Renaissance man,” she said. “He’s an educator, an artist, a sailor, a rigger, a gardener, a birder. He’s so many people I love.”

Another friend, architect Bill Sharples, agreed.

“There are few people who can walk into a room and just lift everyone up,” he said. “He creates positive energy.”

‘All the way’

Kreiling’s childhood on the North Fork was shaped by water.

“We were fish by the time we were 10,” said Mike Drobet, a close friend since childhood.

In summers, Kreiling and his pals were dropped off at the Mattituck Yacht Club, then a scrappy, kid-centered beach club with Sunfish boats lined up in the sand.

“It was basically child care,” Kreiling joked. “Parents would dump you there with a boat and say, ‘See you at five.’”

He won his first sailing trophy on a nearly windless day.

“Everyone else was jumping around the boat,” he said with a laugh. “I just stayed still.”

Winters were spent on marshes, frozen creeks and in the woods. Kreiling and his friends trapped muskrats, went eeling at night and pulled themselves onto ice floes on the bay. He remembers falling through ice into the waist-deep water, then trudging home soaked and freezing.

The natural world left an indelible impression on him, and he sought to recreate what he saw at every turn.

“He’s always been creative,” Drobet said. “From when I first knew him, he could draw anything, at a moment’s notice.”

By high school, Kreiling was split between biology and art. He earned a perfect score on the state biology Regents exam but felt equally pulled towards drawing, color and typography.

He credits his parents for his early exposure to the arts. On family museum trips, he recalled, “I’d be looking for the dinosaurs while my parents were staring at a [Robert] Motherwell” painting.

At SUNY Fredonia, he plunged into photography, printmaking and bronze casting.

“When I got into something, I went all the way,” he said.

Printmaking was a foundational craft for him. Hand-lettered film-forum posters introduced him to typography. Photography became a sensory education long before he entered the design world — spending years in New York City producing book covers, annual reports, catalogs and theater work art.

RELATED READ: Peggy Lauber’s Next Adventure

When Kreiling returned to the North Fork in the 1980s, he noticed how much the place had changed. “I want[ed] to give my kids what I had, but it was gone,” he said. “You couldn’t do the walk from the bay to the Sound anymore. You’d be on private property.”

Sailing with friends off Sag Harbor one golden October afternoon, he wondered why he was living anywhere else. “By Christmas,” he said, “I had closed my business, rented a place out here and bought a computer.”

Kreiling earned a teaching degree and became an art and photography teacher in Southold. He loved the work, perhaps a bit too much.

“I got the kids a little too revved up,” he admitted.

Meanwhile, he was rebuilding his design career remotely and relearning sailing. His first marriage ended, but the next chapter followed quickly.

He met Lauber, a Greenport neighbor with a pet Nubian goat. One morning, while they were walking the goat through the village, the animal wandered into Kreiling’s house, ate his only houseplant and woke his young son from a nap — delighting the child.

“I like this girl,” the boy told his father. “You should marry her.”

He did.

He leaned back into sailing, combining his love of water with his skills as a graphic designer.

For decades, Kreiling has donated designs and logos to sailing races, including the Safe Harbor Time Warp Regatta, the Brooklyn Ocean Challenge Cup, the King of the Bays Regatta and the beloved Whitebread Regatta race around Shelter Island. Many North Fork sailors first knew him through those posters and designs: clean, hand-drawn lines on a race flyer, the white-on-blue silhouettes of hulls and sails.

“He’s given a lot of himself to our Peconic Bay Sailing Association,” Drobet said. “Every year he volunteers to create a logo … He puts a lot of time into that, and it promotes our organization through all the graphics he does that go along with the race: all the publications and so forth.” 

Since building his Greenport studio in 2015, Kreiling’s work has become more prolific and public. In the high-ceilinged shop behind their house on Sixth St., he produces everything from chalkboard sketches and watercolors to museum-ready pieces for the East End Seaport Museum.

He also teaches sailing and through Easterly Sailing captains charters on the couple’s racing sailboat, Yikes. Kreiling taught Sharples, his architect friend, to sail.

“He goes out of his way to help,” Sharples said. “Paul is — first of all, he’s got an incredible heart. He lives in the moment … especially when you’re out in the water with him.”

Drobet said his friend is a fearless tactician on the water.

“We were sailing together, delivering a boat, and it was a pretty scary time coming into an inlet off  North Carolina,” he said. “It was in the dark, it was big waves and it was a bit of a white-knuckle ride, but he was grinning and laughing and screaming. I was getting ready to call the Coast Guard.

“He doesn’t scare easy, much to my chagrin.”

‘Standing alone’

For years, Kreiling sailed past the deteriorating Long Beach Bar “Bug Light” lighthouse at the mouth of Greenport Harbor. One winter, he attended a meeting at the East End Seaport Museum, which owns the lighthouse (the U.S. Coast Guard maintains the light), and watched the board dissolve.

“Everybody was fighting,” he said. “Then everybody quit. I was standing there alone.” So he stepped in.

Over roughly the last decade, Kreiling has become the museum’s creative engine, “shining up the old stories” and turning a cluttered collection of maritime artifacts into a coherent narrative space.

He rebuilt the interior, designed immersive exhibits like the 1960s show and its wall-to-wall timeline and experimented with interactive displays. He did the artwork, layout and signage and increasingly, the strategic thinking.

For years, efforts to restore “Bug Light” consisted mostly of good intentions: patch jobs, small grants, lists of what still needed to be done. In the early 2020s, with support from the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation and a growing circle of advisers, the museum shifted into full capital-campaign mode — a multi-phase, multimillion-dollar effort to stabilize the island and rebuild the structure.

Kreiling is right at the center of that campaign. He knocks on doors and writes appeals. He sits through strategy sessions about designated funds and matching grants. Then he returns to his studio to figure out how to explain it all visually to the public.

“He really led a transformation of the museum into a new era with dynamic exhibits that told stories,” said Sarah Sands, chair of the museum’s board of trustees. “We’re trying to move the museum from just a small Greenport museum to an East End Seaport Museum, and he was really the catalyst for that.”

Sands said that “enthusiasm is his middle name. Anyone who listens to one of his proposals or projects is immediately taken with whatever he wants to do,” she said, “because his personality is very contagious adnd he gets everyone excited about doing the things that he’s passionate about.”

Even as he turned 70 this year, Kreiling shows no signs of slowing. He remains a sailor, rigger, designer, birder and artist — still experimenting, still restless, still perpetually on the move.