Applied Arts and Health: Building Bridges across Art, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community

This collection documents diverse approaches in creative arts engagement, building metaphoric bridges across the field with an emphasis on creativity and well-being in education and community development.

Focussing on applied arts and health practice, research, scholarship, expressive arts therapy, community and education, the book advances integrative and multimodal art-based processes. This book aims to give prominence to art-based research and provides useful support to those working and researching across applied arts and health, education and community contexts. The book brings together a collection of world-leading authors in the field spanning a range of cultures, documenting projects and significantly adding to cohesive research in the field.

In continuing to advance applied arts and health, whilst furthering a commitment to art-based research, this new book places emphasis upon the artistic research methodology, underlining that art (performing art and visual art) is the evidence. It offers the field an integral vision for the arts both theoretically and practically. Further, the book breaks down the silos of practice that have been unhelpful in their development.

The audience for this book will include art-based researchers, expressive arts practitioners and scholars, arts educators, and those interested in bridging the gap between arts and health practice. Masters and doctoral level students in art-based research, participatory research, and qualitative research with an arts-focus are another audience for the book. All applied arts and health practitioners and academics, arts educators, art therapists and university PaR programmes. Whilst of particular use to postgraduate students, this text will also be useful to final year undergraduate students in assisting them with creative practice-based dissertations and projects. Also useful to researchers, practitioners and a range of research degree programmes in applied arts and health, education and community engagement.

Emeritus Professor Ross W. Prior is best known for his work in applied arts and health as the founding principal editor of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health (JAAH), established in 2010. In 2015, he was appointed inaugural professor of learning and teaching in the arts in higher education at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, where he is retained. Professional memberships include fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and principal fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA). At the time of publication, he is a long-standing member of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College for UK Research and Innovation. His most recent co-edited book is Applied Arts and Health: Building Bridges across Arts, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community (Intellect, 2022).

Contact: Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton, The Performance Hub, Walsall Campus, Gorway Road, Walsall WS1 3BD, UK.

Professor Mitchell Kossak (Ph.D., LMHC, REAT) is the associate editor for the Journal of Applied Arts & Health. He is also a professor and former director in the Expressive Therapies programme at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, and past president for the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association. He is a licensed clinical counsellor and registered expressive arts therapist. He has presented his work and research on rhythmic attunement, improvisation, psychospiritual and community-based approaches to working with trauma at conferences nationally and internationally and is the author of Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward an Understanding of Embodied Empathy (Charles C Thomas, 2021).

Contact: Lesley University, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Teresa A. Fisher is a doctoral candidate in the educational theatre programme at New York University. A former mental health counsellor and play therapist, Teresa’s interest is in using theatre to explore how we understand our bodies, focusing on obesity. She is an educator, theatre artist, and an administrator. She is also the Production Manager/Administrator for the Program in Educational Theatre’s New Plays for Young Audiences summer series for the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable.