A multi-disciplinary team led by CRESC (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester) Senior Research Fellow Dr Andrew Miles has been awarded £1.5 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a five-year research project under its Communities, Culture and Creative Economies funding programme.
Following the success of a two year fundraising campaign, two large drawings by illustrators Posy Simmonds and Michael Foreman have recently been loaned to a hospital in Surrey by the charity Paintings in Hospitals.
Arts & Health South West has announced the launch of the Arts & Health South West Awards sponsored by the Fine Family Foundation, designed to celebrate inspirational arts and health work in the South West.
The NEA is leading a new task force of 13 federal agencies and departments to encourage more and better research on how the arts help people reach their full potential at all stages of life.
Creative Health CIC and Staffordshire Arts & Museums Service have announced their plans to merge the praXis and Creative Remedies websites and develop a new resource for arts and health practitioners across the region.
The Society for the Arts in Healthcare is an American organisation dedicated to promoting the arts as integral to patient and community health and wellbeing. In November it will celebrate its second annual Arts + Health Month, an opportunity for organisations and individuals worldwide to hold events to promote the integration of the arts into a wide variety of healthcare and community settings for therapeutic, educational, and expressive purposes.
Voluntary Arts, the national representative body for the amateur arts and crafts across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, has announced the appointment of Peter Stark as its new Chair. Peter has taken over from Kathryn Deane of Sound Sense, who has stepped down at the end of her maximum term of six years as Chair of Voluntary Arts.
The Waterford Healing Arts Trust (WHAT) and Create, the Irish national development agency for collaborative arts in social and community contexts have launched artsandhealth.ie , the first national independent arts and health website in Ireland.
The website has been developed by Create and WHAT and was initiated and funded by the Irish Arts Council, as part of its new Arts and Health Policy and Strategy published at the end of 2010.
English National Ballet and Roehampton University have announced the commissioning of research into the benefits of dance for people with Parkinson’s disease. ‘Dance for Parkinson’s’ was a 12 week project, funded by City of Westminster, which attracted 24 people with Parkinson’s, their family members and carers. Each week the group met for a dance class inspired by Rudolph Nureyev’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’.
The London Creativity and Wellbeing Week 2012 will take place from June 13-20 this summer and promises to be a great showcase for the huge variety of arts and health activity in the capital.
