The Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing is a unique Centre with regional, national and international reputation due to its strong emphasis on high quality research with interdisciplinary character and impactful knowledge exchange activities. The Centre works closely with the WHO Arts and Health office, it has received external funding from bodies such as NIHR, AHRC, ESRC, Arts Council, the Welcome Trust and the European Union, and explores the role of the arts to supporting the health and wellbeing of individuals across the life span and their communities.
The Centre celebrates the use of diverse research approaches from creative co-produced research to high profile outcome and implementation studies. The co-produced and applied character of the research findings generated from the Centre are disseminated through publications, events and masterclasses and benefit many people, their communities, statutory and non-statutory organisations and services, contributing towards improved practice with sustainable impact.
In addition to its strong portfolio of externally funded research, the Centre has an active approach to knowledge exchange, including the commercialisation of intellectual property created by members of the Centre.
In summary, the aim of the Centre, ‘to engage in purposeful interdisciplinary research with people across their life span in creative ways, that are participatory, ethical and of demonstrable value’.
The Centre’s mission is ‘to generate, process and actively disseminate research evidence’.
Three main strands of research covered by the Centre are as follows:
Our research
Events
Who we are
The Centre’s researchers come from different disciplines and specialties including arts and health researchers, computer and sports specialists, and engage with multi-layered, national and international partnerships including NHS Trusts, charities, schools, and cultural organisations contributing toward good practice in the arts to improve the lives of people, their communities and their wider environment. Our manifesto with relevant illustrated material can also be found here:
Director- Professor Vicky Karkou
Vicky is the Director of the Research Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, Edge Hill University, and an internationally known academic and researcher in the arts and arts psychotherapies with external funding successes of over £10 million from funding bodies such as the NIHR, AHRC, ESRC, the EU and the Wellcome Trust. She leads the project Arts4Us, the largest research awards on the arts, arts therapies and children’s mental health (£2.5 million) funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) involving over 50 collaborators and partners. This project builds on the Arts for the Blues, an evidence-based creative group psychotherapy for people with depression, which, in collaboration with the University of Salford and funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), has been scaled up nationally and internationally. Other studies she leads on are NIHR-funded trials on using creative therapy interventions with children and young people in CYPMHS and other psychological services, and several studies in schools and charities. She is also a co-investigator for the NIHR-funded mental health leadership award that focuses on children and the NIHR-HTA-funded national trial ERA that looks at chronic mental health conditions.
Part of Vicky’s international work involves research collaborations with colleagues from around the world. For example, she has led the UK arm of a project funded by the European Union on dance for cancer care involving colleagues from five different countries. With funding from the Wellcome Trust and collaboration with colleagues from India and the Caribbean, she has supervised a systematic review on arts interventions to support the mental health of helping professionals. She is an affiliate researcher for the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, a founding member of the International Creative Arts Therapies Research Alliance, working on commissioned projects from the WHO Arts and Health Office.
She is widely published in peer reviewed journals (over 100), authored/edited/co-edited books (5 in total) and has written numerous chapters. She is also the co-editor of the international journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy published by Taylor and Francis.
Honorary Fellowship – Christopher Bailey
Christopher Bailey is a co-founding co-director of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab and founded the WHO Arts and Health program. The lab focuses on the evidence base for the health benefits of the arts by building up a global network of research centers to look at effective practice as well as the foundational science of why the arts may benefit physical, mental and social wellbeing. The emphasis of the program is supporting underserved communities around the world. Through its Healing Arts activities, the program also engages with the global media and communities to promote evidence based arts and health practice and build solidarity on health issues through all media.
Educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities as well as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after a career as a professional actor and playwright, Bailey joined the Rockefeller Foundation as their Research Manager, and from there was recruited to WHO where he lead the Health Informatics work and later their on-line communications team before starting the Arts and Health program. As an ambassador for the field, Bailey has also performed original pieces such as Stage 4: Cancer and the Imagination, Strangers in Time: transgenerational trauma and the arts, and The Vanishing Point: A journey into Blindness and Perception, in venues around the world, from the Hamwe Festival in Rwanda, to the Wellcome Collection in London, to the World Bank in DC, as well as Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in NY, the LA Opera, LACMA, and Warner Bros Studios in LA, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Budapest Opera, the National Theatre of the Ukraine, and the Kennedy Center among many others. The basic message of his work is to amplify the WHO definition of health which states that health is not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, but the attainment of the highest level of physical, mental and social wellbeing. The arts have uniquely evolved to do just that.