Creative Health Collaborations was first conceived in 2015 to encourage collaborations between ASU faculty in health, humanities, arts and design. In the spring of 2017, Creative Health Collaborations joined the Team Leadership Academy of Knowledge Enterprise, a capacity-building initiative designed to foster ASU’s readiness to respond to new research challenges and advance initiatives of central importance to ASU. 

Creative Health Collaborations is co-directed by founding members Tamara Underiner, associate dean for academic affairs in ASU’s Graduate College and associate professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre, and David Coon (Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation). Founding members constituting its interdisciplinary board of ASU faculty advisers are Marlon Bailey, Bradley Doebbeling, Cora Fox, Shelby Langer, Elizabeth Reifsnider and John Takamura. Kimberly Fields serves as program manager. The team’s mission is to bring about a healthier world through collaborations integrating arts, design, health and humanities approaches in research, education, practice and policy.

“We know in our bones that the arts, design and humanities have something to do with healing, for both individuals and communities,” said Underiner. “Creative Health Collaborations is about trying to understand how, and why, and under what circumstances this is so. If we can start to build the right kind of evidence, in collaboration with colleagues in the health sciences, then integrating the contributions of arts, design and humanities into regular health care practices and settings will more and more become the norm — for the benefit of all. And where else but ASU to do that kind of work?”