OT’s Lisa Raymond-Tolan Receives Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award

Research explores how filmmaking can benefit development of children within school-based occupational therapy.

15 people smily for the photo, many wearing or holding paper animal masks — We Made This Film workshop

Lisa Raymond-Tolan, clinical assistant professor in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Occupational Therapy (OT), is part of a team that has been awarded a 2026 Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award with collaborators Julie Meslin and Marilena Marchetti. The project explores whether filmmaking can be used to help develop executive function, fine motor skills, and social-emotional learning for children in school-based occupational therapy.

The project—now known as We Made This Film—originated more than a decade ago when Marchetti, a documentary filmmaker and school-based OT in the Bronx, began to use filmmaking as an intervention with her students. After great success, she spearheaded a multi-school film festival in partnership with Meslin, an OT with a background in theatre and set design. In 2019, student films debuted at an event they dubbed “The Film Festival from Mars” at Lincoln Center.

A photo of 4 people interacting around a table with play dough, a camera stand, and one person smiling, writing on a piece of paper

We Made This Film offers in-person training courses in New York City for school-based OTs to learn how to implement this filmmaking intervention, for which they can earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs). Because of this reach, hundreds of students in special education have seen their films exhibited before peers and parents.

“We Made This Film incorporates long-term projects in which kids in school-based OT programs are working together, writing scripts, doing costumes, and learning filming techniques,” says Raymond-Tolan. “This is such a transformative and innovative way to enhance student autonomy and intrinsic motivation, and now we want to measure the impact this has on both the practitioners and the kids.”

Raymond-Tolan’s qualitative and mixed-methods study will gather data from OT practitioners and students through journaling, surveys, focus groups, and more and assess outcomes such as professional impact and progress toward meeting Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals.

3 people look at a tablet in a classroom

“There is so much you can target with this kind of work—fine and gross motor skills, literacy, social-emotional learning, and more,” says Raymond-Tolan. “We are hopeful that this intervention is not only amazing and fun for OTs and for students, but also that it helps mitigate OT burnout, impacts child autonomy, and ignites other creative pursuits.”

Helping students see themselves in creative roles is particularly powerful for kids with disabilities or other challenges because they aren’t well-represented in existing media. By confronting stigma around disability and recognizing filmmaking as a versatile clinical approach, We Made This Film advances occupational justice while creating an innovative, repeatable model for inclusive, arts-driven special education.

Gratitude for Award Recognition

Now in its third year, the Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award provides $25,000 in seed funding to 10 teams of early-career investigators working across sciences and the arts to advance the emerging field of neuroarts. The award was established by the Renée Fleming Foundation and administered through the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative, which is building a community of allies who understand the imperative of using art as a science-based tool to advance society’s collective health and well-being.

“Receiving this award is so exciting for us,” says Raymond-Tolan. “The funding helps us in many ways, from buying much-needed supplies like tripods and clapperboards to offsetting travel costs when we present our work at conferences. This recognition also validates the work we’ve done over the past many years. We’re just in New York City now, but it would be really cool to be able to share this with OTs and students across the country.”

Learn more about all the 2026 Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Awardees.

Occupational Therapy's Lisa Raymond-Tolan Gets NYU TAG Grant for Play Observation

NYU Steinhardt OT students and faculty traveled this fall to The Yard, an adventure playground on Governors Island, to see how kids play in real time.