The renowned musician joins professor and advocate Nisha Sajnani’s September conference, timed for the United Nations Healing Arts Week and a new medical journal series.
Young people participated in Art Is a Doctor, a project in Austria that offered creative arts therapies to children with mental health challenges. Photograph by Miki Kap-Herr in Salzburg, Austria. Courtesy of University Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Christian Doppler Clinic, Paracelsus Medical University.
For decades, Nisha Sajnani, professor and director of the Drama Therapy program at NYU Steinhardt, has been asking questions of clinicians, researchers, and policymakers about the many benefits of the arts on our health and well-being. Can dramatic improvisation and role-play support mental health? How might dancing contribute to healthier aging? Does listening to music soothe symptoms of dementia?
More recently, Sajnani—who is also co-founder of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab at NYU Steinhardt—has been delivering answers backed by research from around the world.
Sajnani celebrates this surge of evidence-based solutions with the Jameel Arts & Health Lab–Lancet Global Collection on Arts and Health, a new series published by one of the world’s leading medical journals. Highlighting current research and proposing a roadmap for advancing research, policy, and practice, the publication is timed to the third annual conference on arts and health on September 22 at the Skirball Center for the Arts.
“What has changed is the story that we are able to tell,” Sajnani explains. "The evidence now allows us to ask a much more important question: How do we make the benefits of the arts and creative arts therapies available to more people from supporting well-being and preventing illness to helping people manage health conditions and receive care?”
The Orleans Museum of Fire Arts collaborated with health authorities to allow civilians to donate blood in an art museum gallery. Photo courtesy of the Musee de Beaux-Arts d'Orleans.
Headlining the conference, From Evidence to Action, is a performance and presentation by renowned musical artist Jon Batiste, who will be joined by music therapist Joanne Loewy, founding director of the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The event also features a panel of heavyweights in the field, including Daisy Fancourt, author of Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health; Agustín Ibáñez, a neuroscientist advancing global research on brain health and dementia; Nikos Stefanis, a psychiatrist leading Greece’s pioneering national arts-prescribing program; and Jill Sonke, a US cultural policy fellow with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The conference is part of NYU’s Arts and Impact initiative and coincides with the United Nations General Assembly Healing Arts Week 2026. The full schedule and information about tickets can be found at the Healing Arts New York website.
NYU News spoke to Sajnani about her research and advocacy and how arts and creative arts therapies are being used to improve lives around the world.
You collaborated with the World Health Organization’s Regional Health Office for Europe in 2023 to create the Jameel Arts & Health Lab. What is its mission?
There are thousands of creative arts therapists, artists, and allied health providers who are doing extraordinary work, but much of that work has historically been fragmented. So the Lab was created to connect these efforts, to bring people and disciplines together, and to help promising approaches reach the scale where they can influence health systems and policy.
What has changed to make creative therapies more central and more accepted in the healthcare and wellness space?
When I started, psychiatry was the dominant paradigm, medication was the dominant intervention, and creative therapies were not really considered as part of the treatment plan. I’ve been practicing as a drama therapist since 2002, and I earned my doctorate in 2010. Since then there’s been a real shift in people's receptivity to more holistic approaches to health and well-being. COVID was an accelerant. There was a rupture that affected our collective health and well-being and suddenly we were all concerned with our interdependence and what helps us cope and gets us through. At the same time, the science has become much stronger.
Can you give more examples of art therapies and interventions that have been proven through scientific research to be beneficial?
A group of mothers in Romania are photographed by Ioana Ofelia during a singing session designed to help with postpartum depression. Photo courtesy of Iona Ofelia for Cluj Cultural Centre.
There’s tremendous evidence around dance and Parkinson’s disease; we know it can improve balance, mobility, and gait, while supporting quality of life. We see something similar with music-based interventions which can meaningfully reduce pain and be a catalyst for memory, conversation, and social connection for people with dementia and their caregivers. Drama-based interventions like drama therapy have also been shown to improve mental health and well-being, including reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Research we have led on visual art in hospitals has shown that it can reduce stress and promote a sense of connection and care among patients, staff, and visitors.
But some of the research I find most exciting now is getting underneath those outcomes and asking what is actually happening biologically when we engage in the arts. There’s fascinating new work using “brain clocks” showing that sustained creative experience in dance, music, and visual art is associated with patterns of younger brain age. We’re also beginning to understand how arts engagement may affect stress physiology, inflammation, and immune function.
The September 22 conference is timed to the publication of two articles and a photo collection in The Lancet. Why is this collection important?
What’s exciting about the Lancet collection is that it brings together leading researchers, practitioners, and artists to document what we know, where the gaps remain, and to provide a roadmap for building the infrastructure we need to move forward. The collection also documents countries where arts-based interventions are already being integrated into health policy and makes the case for further economic analysis to understand why health, cultural, and care systems should invest resources in these approaches. In addition to being able to read about meaningful pathways to take this work forward, the collection includes a photo essay depicting hospitals, museums, theatres, refugee camps, and urban and rural communities around the world.
How does your work with the Lab inform your teaching?
My primary responsibility in the graduate program in Drama Therapy is preparing students to become licensed creative arts therapists, so the focus is largely on treatment and care. My work with the Lab allows me to bring emerging research and examples from around the world directly into the classroom to equip students with capacities to critically analyze and make practical use of available evidence and help them see where their work fits within the larger landscape of arts and health.
That extends across my teaching at NYU. In the interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Sciences PhD program, I mentor doctoral students whose scholarship brings the arts and arts therapies into conversation with occupational therapy, physical therapy, nutrition, applied psychology, public health, design, and engineering. And at NYU Abu Dhabi, I introduce undergraduates from a wide range of disciplines to the possibilities of this growing field in a course I developed called “Can Art Save Lives?” Across all of these settings, I want students to understand the evidence, see the opportunities, and feel confident about the role they can play in shaping what comes next.
Peggy McGlone
(212) 998-6829
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