Arts and Health
I have been working in the field of arts and health since 2003 when I ran my first project in Sibasa, a town in the Venda region of the Limpopo Province. Since then, much of my practice and theatre-making has been about creating spaces in which young people can talk about and consider what safe sexual health means for them. But this only one part of my interest in the role that arts, and in particular applied arts, can play in extending and complicating our understandings of health, of finding ways of better expressing experiences of health (both good ill and ill health) between patients and medical practitioners, and as a way of celebrating and listening to diverse stories of health that we do not often hear.
Since 2015 I have been a Board Member and a Trustee for the London Arts in Health Forum (LAHF). In July 2018, I was invited to participate in a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing at the House of Lords.
I have presented and published widely in the area of arts and health. In 2017, I co-edited with Dr Veronica Baxter, the first applied arts in health book: Applied Theatre: Performing Health & Wellbeing (Bloomsbury Methuen).