NYU Steinhardt Hosts Second Annual Symposium for UNGA Healing Arts Week

On September 22, NYU Steinhardt hosted Re-Imagining Health Through the Arts, a full-day symposium on the multifaceted ways the arts and arts therapies foster physical health, mental well-being, and civic care across the lifespan.

The symposium was presented as part of UN General Assembly (UNGA) Healing Arts Week by the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, established in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). The day included lectures, roundtables, breakout sessions, and artistic performances by the Queens Center for Gay Seniors, Sing for Hope, and Dancing Dreams, which creates performance opportunities for children with medical or physical challenges.

“We gather today under a theme of proud urgency, but also great possibility,” said Jack H. Knott, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean at NYU Steinhardt in his opening remarks. “We are reimagining health through the arts in a moment when the traditional boundaries around wellness are being questioned. When rates of anxiety, isolation, chronic disease, and social disconnection are increasing, the arts offer paths not merely for solace but for renewal, connection, scientific insight, equity, and justice.”

The conference was chaired by Nisha Sajnani, professor and director of NYU Steinhardt’s graduate program in Drama Therapy and director of Arts & Health @ NYU. As the founding co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, Sajnani discussed highlights in the Lab’s work at the nexus of art and health, including publishing an article in Nature Medicine on the role of the arts in preventing noncommunicable diseases, launching a Lancet photo essay on the arts and health at the Guggenheim, and partnering with the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund to establish the Healing Arts New York Network.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Daisy Fancourt, professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London; director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health; and head of the steering committee for the Jameel Arts & Health Lab. 

Fancourt’s talk made the case for why the arts—alongside diet, sleep, exercise, and social connections—are the forgotten fifth pillar of health. She noted that while the arts are included in early writings in every major medical tradition, from Greek philosopher Aristotle to an 11th century Persian encyclopedia of medicine, their inclusion as part of good health is “quite a radical rethink for modern Western medicine.”