Culture Lab: Artist as Healer
I created, designed and led an R&D project called Culture Lab: Artist as Healer. This multi-year initiative is a partnership between Indian Summer Arts Society and Canada India Network Society (CINS) with significant multi-year support from the Vancouver Foundation through their Systems Change grant. The project invites and resources South Asian artists in Metro Vancouver to work collaboratively with other artists, mentors, and members of the medical and wellness communities to develop healing methodologies through art. The project creates the space and resources for artists to come up with what I call ‘remedies against despair’ and ‘potions for joy’. As the project’s Founder and Artistic Director, I provided overall direction to the lab and working closely with the lab’s Medical Director, the noted clinical pathologist Dr. Arun Garg, MD FRCPS, who is the former President of the BC Medical Association. Thanks go to Dr. Garg for his decades of work in this area, and to my colleague Laura June Albert, who was instrumental in developing the program structure and jury process, and played a major role in securing the seed funding for the project.
2022 Artist
I worked closely with Yogacharini Maitreyi, the inaugural lead artist of the Artist as Healer project to support and resource her vision. Maitreyi straddles the worlds of the arts and healing. She is a trained filmmaker with a degree in visual communications, as well as an international master yoga teacher, practical mystic, and founder of Arkaya Awareness Centre and Arkaya Foundation. Her residency included a series of conversations and panels with health researchers, yoga practitioners, artists, Indigenous elders and rehabilitation specialists and culminated in a short film on inner and outer healing. The international CINI 2022 conference on Women’s Health saw her in conversation with Dr. Farah Shroff (Takemi Fellow in International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) expert Hannah Marsh of the Mindfulness Institute.