A

Welcome to behind the Curtain, LA Opera's official podcast. Each week we dive deep into the creative process with the artists, creatives and scholars who bring opera to life. Get ready to decode the drama, dissect the music and hear the heart behind the high notes. From backstage laughs to history making moments, every opera starts with a story. Today on the podcast, Gail Eichenthal is joined by leaders at the intersection of Arts and Health to celebrate LA Opera's partnerships and impact as we reflect on five years of LA County Arts and Health Week summits. Listen in to conversations covering our fifth annual summit's core themes From Research to Practice with Dr. Sunil Iyengar of the NEA Five years of progress with Kristen Sakoda, Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and Advocacy across Sectors with Co Director of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, Dr. Nisha Sajnani. Then we'll hear from LA Opera Connect's Vice President, Dr. Andrea Fuentes, as we look to the future of caring for our communities through the arts.

B

Hello everyone and welcome to behind the Curtain. I'm your host, Gail Eichenthal. It's a special time of year here at LA Opera Connects, Los Angeles County's Arts and Health Week and our fifth annual Arts and Health Week Summit. Each June we explore the connections between music, wellness and recovery as part of our year round collaborations with Los Angeles medical centers, support groups, social service organizations and other community venues like libraries and senior centers. The Summit on Friday, June 12th is the culminating event of this annual initiative and we'll be welcoming hundreds of community members to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a Resource Fair, interactive workshops, conversations featuring practitioners, administrators, researchers, philanthropists and other cross sector leaders, and much more. In fact, I'm proud to serve as emcee for the day and I can't wait to see you there. Today on the podcast, I'll be joined by several leaders at this intersection of arts and health to discuss their work and some of the latest developments in what is still a relatively new field of exploration. Listen to each of these brief conversations and we trust you'll share our excitement here at LA Opera Connects about these incredible advancements. Then register for free for the Arts and Health summit@laopera.org Summit First, I'm joined by Sunil Iyengar, the Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. We're going to be talking about how promising models can can evolve into sustainable, measurable programs for the arts. Sunil has had tremendous leadership in this field. He's produced dozens of reports, webinars, blog posts, podcast episodes about research on the value and impact of the arts. And with his colleagues, he established a research and data partnership with the U.S. census Bureau, with the National Institutes of Health and many other agencies. And Iyengar and his team founded a national data repository for arts and culture and a statistical Reporting center for the arts and so much more. But we're so thrilled to have you with us, sort of setting the stage for what's going to happen on June 12th. Sunil, welcome.

C

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

B

I'm sure that our listeners are familiar with the NEA and the many, many ways that it supports art programs and arts organizations all over the US but perhaps they're not as familiar with the arts and health work under the nea. And maybe you could just kind of give us a little bit of an introduction into what research is being done in those areas.

C

Yes, very glad to so of course, the National Endowment for the Arts primary mission is to ensure that people all throughout the nation have an opportunity to experience the arts and arts education at every stage of life. So a lot of our work really, truly goes towards supporting those arts experiences. However, as just stated in our recent new strategic plan, we're also about promoting the benefits of the arts to as many people as possible and ensuring they're really widely understood and recognized. So one of the areas we particularly double down on is the arts relationship to health and well being. We do this in a number of ways. It's now a central part of our strategic plan that we support projects that can enhance health and well being through the arts. Those projects with particular focus on certain populations and diseases. So for example, we're particularly big on studies and projects that relate to military personnel, veterans, their families in health. We have a major program called Creative Forces which embeds creative arts therapists. It's music, dance, art therapists in military health facilities and veterans hospitals throughout the country. But the great thing about that is we're continually conducting research there too. We with our partners, the Departments of Defense and Department of Veterans affairs to understand how is this, for example, helping to mitigate symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury? How does it help with emotional coping? How does it help with social interaction? So we're doing a lot of studies in that space. We also are very interested in some other topics, just naming a few. We're interested in pediatric cancer care and the arts, how the arts can help to again assist with emotional coping and other social and also how to really Help give agency to survivors and to patients of pediatric cancer. Also looking at opioid use and the art's role in substance abuse prevention and recovery and treatment. And so we've got a new report coming out soon that's going to update some evidence on this and showcase arts programs that are really helping at that intersection of arts and substance abuse. We do a lot of other things. We also support research about the arts in older adults and also arts and early learners, and particularly those with autism. So various projects and then some of these are supported through our research grants. And we also have a program called NEA Research Labs which are multi year research studies that occur throughout the country.

B

Wow. Give us a little hint as to what we're going to hear when you release your research findings about opioid use and the artist.

C

Yeah, well, it turns out that five years ago we had released a report, report, you know, at the height of the opioid epidemic, which of course happened to coincide when we released it with the pandemic. So maybe it didn't get as much play as it would. But we are now updating it with new research. And I will say, so far, and this isn't based, you know, we still have to put out the new report. But what we seem to know already is that music therapies, music programs, seem to be particularly successful in addressing pain management, which is of course often a cause for opioid reliance. To me, it's a very. It's a shorthand for thinking about how the arts are really often provide non pharmacological relief for so many people in so many ways. I mean, this is just one example. And we now know through neuroscience, through other types of studies in psychology and even in various physiological measurements, we know that the arts have this ability to do things like, for example, we believe that it slows cognitive decline among older adults or that the arts can be brought to bear in improving outcomes for early childhood development, for example. There are a lot of studies we could point to that support those claims. We obviously need more research and that's where I think we come in to support that research through our grants and projects. And we have some projects where particularly we're proud of all our projects, but some of them have really taken off and have created a name for themselves in particular areas. So for example, one of the major research labs we support is at the University of Florida. It's called the EPI Arts Lab. And why is it called that? Because they basically take an epidemiological approach to understanding how the arts Improve public health. And they do this by looking at very large data sets, including longitudinal studies that have data on the arts as well as data about health and well being. And they've concluded over the years many fascinating findings with a partnership with University College London. And many of them have published and have been published and have gained a lot of press attention, too. Most recently, they had a study out looking at, I just referred to cognitive declines while they were looking at healthy brain aging for people who engage with the arts, showing that looking at some pretty hard measures in terms of epigenetic markers, it seems to suggest that the aging process might be mitigated through arts participation. Now, that's a pretty bold claim to make. And they don't. They're very careful because they're researchers to say this is just one study. But they did look at a bunch of longitudinal data, you know, with a lot of sample size to investigate that claim. And that was one of the things they found. They found many other positive correlations and linkages that suggest a plausible connection between the arts and these positive health outcomes, even when you control for other variables, demographic variables and socioeconomic variables. There's another one, University of Colorado, Denver. This is really interesting, I think, because it affects everyone, but we may not think of it that way. You know, we saw during COVID how stressed out healthcare workers were, right? This is a perennial phenomenon is people training in the medical professions in healthcare are often under a lot of stress, burnout among residency program people, you know, all kinds of clothes areas. And it turns out that arts therapies and arts programs can actually help to alleviate that burnout and also improve empathy among these medical trainees. And so that's something they are looking at the University of Colorado very successfully. They've shown this. This has a lot of implications for the way our doctors are trained and the way our healthcare providers are trained. And it could potentially reduce, say, for example, medical errors because you're having more rested, more empathetic doctors and clinicians who are in the space partly because they're engaging in these programs as part of their medical training.

B

You mentioned you've shown a slowing of cognitive decline in older adults. And I know that at BCI Brain and Creativity Institute at usc, they've been looking a lot at that among other populations. Can you talk about where the research stands with that for those of us who might have a vested interest?

C

Well, yeah, all of us. Now I'm glad you mentioned USC because we're really proud to support an NEA research lab there. Principal investigator, the Lead researcher is Asal Habibi, and she's been great, and she's studying that very question. We also have researchers looking at jazz piano improvisation among older adults and what it does for keeping their language skills. And so there's a lot of really interesting connections that we wouldn't have suspected. And I think to be just to step back a little, I don't want to oversell this because, you know, these are things that have to be studied in large scale. But a lot of small scale studies are suggesting, you know, showing a lot of promise here, especially since they're being done internationally as well as in the US So we now have a pretty nice mosaic of evidence to look at. And so getting back to your question, I think a lot of this has to do with staying engaged. That was, in fact, the title of one of our reports. Now, that doesn't mean, after we put out the report, I worried people would think, well, we meant staying engaged, like to get married. But it's really, we meant staying engaged and participating in life, you know, and staying, you know, active cognitively. You hear things like, it's good to keep, you know, the brain, keep doing crossword puzzles, doing things like that. Well, the arts may have a super sized benefit here, given what we're seeing about some of the things I mentioned about cognitive decline, but also motor skills development. We've seen dance programs, famously in Parkinson's disease, where dance, dance programs, like, even tango programs have been used to help preserve gait and to actually improve motor function among older adults.

B

In particular, can you talk a little bit about some early findings with the military hospitals?

C

Oh, yeah.

B

Those studies sound fascinating.

C

Yeah, very great. You know, it's really a lot of research going on there and we're really proud of it because this often involves partnerships between universities and military facilities that we help to oversee or a part of. And so we're seeing some great things there. Partly among, I think a couple of things that were sort of, I think the concept of meaning making, like, for people to make sense of what they've experienced in a traumatic experience, you know, of course, people going to war. But also when we talk about traumatic brain injury and other psychological, you know, illnesses related to war, and even also with families coping with these issues, we're seeing that oftentimes something like making masks. There are, for example, programs where these military members make masks, make physical masks to sort of reflect or embody what their experiences are. And these have proved really valuable for these soldiers. Oftentimes we're talking about like, Navy seals Or really hardened warriors, so to speak, who then find themselves in art therapy, and then they experience this as part of it. And I have to emphasize, this is often integrated in other types of clinical offerings. So it's not a standalone thing, but it actually helps them open up in their other sessions. Maybe they're talking to a psychiatrist in their next session or getting some other type of intervention. It seems to be great for emotional coping. And also we're seeing now some signs that it seems to actually reduce the symptoms of traumatic brain injury. So this is all very good. I just use the mask making as one example. But we're seeing this in music in different ways. We're seeing it with dance. And they all have their own kind of bodies of research around them. So we're trying to scale this up. And we've invested in a couple of big studies in this space that are randomized control studies, which gold standard of research where you can try to control for every variable. And you're really making sure that what comes out at the other end shows causality, which I think we all want to point to or try and understand. If we can point to it. And if the answer is no, we at least know that. But I think right now, all signs are pointing to very positive outcomes.

B

One of the challenges for all arts organizations is trying to show evidence that they do good and that it matters and that people are changed by that. And you are perhaps our national expert in this area, and I wondered if you could give us the latest on the national data repository for arts and culture that you and your colleagues set up, a statistical reporting center for the arts, which sounds like the ultimate challenge in logistics.

C

Well, yeah, it is. Well, so. So that's not exclusively about health, but that what that is is, you know, just even for our role, to understand the arts as an ecosystem, you know, we obviously want to know basic facts, descriptive information, like how many artists are there? How many people participate in the arts? What. What kinds of art forms do they take part in, how many students get arts education? We want to know, you know, how much money do artists make and arts workers, and what are the career prospects? So we realize that there are all this information that we're swimming in, because it's actually a lot of it is out there in the form of federal data that has not been tapped. It really is like tapping a maple tree or something. You know, it's like it's there, but you have to kind of harvest and collect it from various sources, and you have to present it in a way that's legible, right? That people can look at and say, oh, I understand what you mean. So we created this system, this statistical center, the National Arts Statistics and Evidence Based Reporting Center. I won't give you the acronym because everything in D.C. has an acronym, but essentially we've created a series of indicators to kind of assess the health of the arts sector, not in terms of physical health, but in terms of, you know, economically looking at audience participation, demand. And it's not perfect, but it's using all the extant federal data to try to come up with some top line numbers that we can repeatedly update and provide a portrait of what's going on in this country. It just is one side of the story, because I really believe statistics have to come with stories, but it gives you something to kind of understand in a nutshell. And I think, as you know, data points can be valuable in all kinds of ways for communications with policy officials when they're looking at resource allocation. And that's where the arts and health thing comes full circle, because this is where we are right now, is we're trying to champion what we know about the arts through evidence and hold up the rigor of that evidence to people through these kinds of statistics, but also through stories. You'll need both to make the case that, you know, if you have a limited amount of funding or if you have a limited amount of discretionary time as a person, the arts are worth your while.

B

Well, you've just mapped out a few minutes ago this tremendous range of areas where the arts have helped. Pediatric cancer, military ptsd, opioid addiction, cognitive decline. There must be some other areas sort of on the horizon. Is there anything that you're looking at or you're beginning to look at in the area of arts and health that excites you for the next horizon in a way?

C

Yeah, there are a couple of things I did mention, you know, caring for the caregiver. I think a lot of people, you know, I talked about medical workers, but this is true of anyone who cares for somebody with a chronic illness, family members. There's a lot of work that can be done. Sometimes. We've seen some programs, some of them are well known where, for example, an older adult with someone with Alzheimer's goes with a caregiver to a museum, and there's a guided program for them where they actually talk about their experience. And it's almost like, you know, they're actually enjoying a new, making a new memory together, you know, and there are programs like that that have really worked well on the ground. And so I'd love to see more of that kind of care for the caregiver kind of stuff. But I also think two big areas. One is, I do think arts education has a lot to offer. We think of is its own box. But if you think about it, we just used the term cognitive. I threw that around. But there's a lot of developmental factors that go into someone being a good learner. This health. Studying how the arts improve health is not far away from studying how do people make a livelihood, how do people fare through educational systems and come out the other end, you know, ready to pursue a new goal in life. And so I think there's a lot there that in the educational bucket that probably needs to be moved over to the health bucket too, if that makes sense. The other thing I think we could all use more of is cost benefit analysis. So understanding, I guess gets back to the resource allocation issue. What do the arts do that other kinds of programs or interventions don't quite do? So if you do comparative studies to understand that, and you even look at costs like do we reduce hospital stay by this much? Or, you know, then you're getting. Can talk to insurers, you can talk to people who actually make decisions about paying for these types of programs. And then it doesn't become only the lonely job of an arts funder. It becomes more of a public good where you have health sector officials, you have people in other areas, community development, I mentioned education, other sectors who can really sit up and see the value proposition of the arts. I think cost benefit analysis, studies, economic study, health economics, if you will, is an area I'd like to see more work in.

B

What do the arts do for your health, personally? What do you do to feel better, arts wise?

C

It keeps me engaged. I mean, really, truly. I don't want to use this cliche, but it does provide a safe space to take a lot of risks. And I think you need a space where you can just let it all hang out. Where you can, you know, you can, you know, playing a musical instrument, even just jamming with people or playing alone or, you know, my case, I play a little guitar, a little ukulele, but also writing. I find writing very. It's a little bit more reflective. Reflective, but it also gives me the ability to make my own space, so to speak. And so that expression is, is really important now. You can also engage in by absorbing the arts through watching it in front of you. And that's great too, or viewing art. So all, all those ways are crucial. I just can't imagine not having that. In a way, I sometimes think, you know, the reason, you know the saying about you should work to live, not live to work. And I think the great thing about the arts is it reminds you why it's worth living. I mean, truly, for me, it does.

B

Thank you for that. For audiences interested in learning more about this research, how can we access the resources and reports the NEA has created? Are they publicly available?

C

Well, Gail, that's my favorite question. Arts.gov go to arts.gov and that's the National Endowment for the Arts website. But then what I will advise you to do is click on a tab that says Impact. And once you see Impact, you'll see a bunch of neat things there. And the thing you may want to click on is something called Arts and Health, or you may want to click on research and go right to the research. So we have if you go to impact, NEA, arts.gov, you'll find all this stuff and actually just offer to people that if you ever want to talk to people at the NEA about funding opportunities or even serving as a panelist on one of our review committees for applications, we're always open to that. So don't hesitate to be in touch.

B

Such a great pleasure to be speaking with you again. Thank you. Sunil Iyengar, Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. Look forward to seeing you June 12th.

C

Pleasure. Thank you so much.

B

Next, we're joined by the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Kristin Sakoda, to reflect a bit on partnerships, impact and some of the key lessons we've learned from five years of arts and health summits. We'll also get a sneak preview of what's ahead. The LA County Department of Arts and Culture is a central force in the Southern California arts ecosystem, advancing arts, culture and creativity to quickly touch on a few of its initiatives, providing grants and technical assistance to to hundreds of nonprofit organizations, schools and arts groups. Also artists running the largest arts internship program in the nation, commissioning civic artworks, supporting all manner of free community arts programs, and so much more. Kristen Sakota herself is an artist, arts executive, attorney, former member of the iconic dance and social justice company Urban Bush Women, and she appeared on Broadway in the musicals Rent and Mamma Mia and many, many more performances on her resume. I have to say that is an amazingly wide ranging resume and I would imagine a really fun career path.

D

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. And yes, I would of course owe it all to access and engagement in the arts, both in school and out of school. Beginning with dance at about age 4, and then, yeah, attending public schools that also had visual arts and did musicals in school and the dance troupe and all the things that helped me create the career that I've had, the experiences that I've had, and marry that with other interests.

B

A living emblem of the importance of arts and health. So we're Talking about our June 12th Arts and Health Week summit on this podcast. And people listening may not realize how involved that your department has been in helping support well being in our communities through the arts as well as the arts in general. As I mentioned, can you tell us a little bit about how the department connects with that concept of arts and health?

D

Absolutely. Well, arts and health is a really dynamic area and sort of confluence of two significant fields in our lives and in public policy, Policy and civic infrastructure that when they come together, are able to really deliver extraordinary impact in ways that are really only just beginning to be fully understood and fully leveraged for their benefit. So I'll start by actually sharing that the intersection of arts and health started for me years prior. I had the good fortune of having the opportunity to spearhead the development of the first creative aging program in New York City. And we brought together the Department of Cultural affairs with the Department of Aging at the time, and I believe it's still running as one of the largest municipal funded arts and aging programs here in Los Angeles. What's been thrilling is to take our long standing work, expanding access to the arts, providing resources to cultural organizations and school districts, and begin to view that through an arts and health lens. And I have to give so much credit to LA Opera for seeing the opportunity to do this. And they actually came to me five, six years ago and said, we think there's something here and we recognize that it's bigger than just us and it's bigger than just opera. And we'd love to know if you, Kristin, would participate, partner with us to start to think about how we can expand this work or bring folks together across arts and health. And that's really how the Arts and Health Summit all began for us. Looking through the lens of arts and health, we see a number of frames from really wide access to the arts, which we provide through our grants. We know that engaging in the arts is beneficial for folks, for your well being, for your mental health, for joy, for social connection. And there have been studies that have shown that communities that have a higher amount of cultural resources, artists, cultural organizations, and programs and activities have statistically correlated better outcomes in areas like public safety and public health and educational attainment. Which tells us something super fascinating, by the way, because it tells us that it's not only about you as an individual. Did you go to the theater? Did you go to the museum? All of that is true. Did you sing in your local choir or church? But it also shows us that at a community wide level, even if you did not yourself go, your entire community will be statistically likely to have better outcomes in all these areas if there's more arts and culture happening in your community. So things like that have made such a huge impression on me. So we do that with our wide ranging grants to organizations. But we also know some of the organizations we fund are really working closely at the intersection of arts and health. Like our Community Impact Arts grant, which provides funding for non arts organizations like social service, social justice organizations that use the arts in their programming. So grantees of this include folks working at the intersection of arts and mental health, disability, immigrant rights, youth, veterans. We've had everybody from the Alzheimer's association to Peace Over Violence. We've had a lot of fabulous grantees support. We're able to support their programs, whether it's dance empowerment or memory programs for dementia or art therapy. So that's been really phenomenal.

B

At the Summit, which is coming up Friday, June 12, the county is so heavily involved. It all started with LA Opera Connects. They reached out to you, as you said, and LA County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis has been a leading partner as well. She got very involved and very excited about it. For those of our listeners who haven't attended the Summit before, and by the way, it is free, can you please tell us what to expect at this event?

D

Absolutely. And you are so right. Current Chair of the Board, Supervisor Solis has become a true champion not only of arts and culture broadly, but specifically of this activity and proclaiming it LA County Arts and Health Week. So in addition to supporting the Summit itself. So it's really fantastic. At this event we bring together artists, practitioners, funders, policymakers and researchers across arts and health for a dynamic day of dialogue panels, networking with one another, and experience experiential sessions where you'd have the opportunity to engage in dance or perhaps a music intervention to really put that on its feet and embody it. And I think one of the things that is exciting about this year's summit is I'm really looking forward to bringing together a conversation with county health leaders. Over the years, I've been able to Engage one or more of the leaders of the community county's health departments at different summits and I'll be bringing multiple of them back together again. So the head of public health and the health system and hospitals and we'll have a leader from Department of Mental Health to really put in context how this work supports the broader needs of health in Los Angeles county. And having exciting conversations with them, with Renee Fleming and others around. What does it mean to be at this 5 year mark? What has happened, but also where do we need to go from here?

B

And looking back on the five years, what do you think has been accomplished through this multi sector involvement and excitement?

D

So much. I mean part of it is they're very tangible, concrete demonstrations of how much this aspect of the field and the work has grown. Even in our own work programs like our Creative well Being initiative, which is arts Education, Healing and Trauma informed arts education for young people, along with arts based professional development for the adults who care for those youth. And that work in five years has expanded greatly where we are now being able to support and serve thousands of young people and adults and connecting with several different county departments for from the foster care system to others, as well as our community based arts partners like the Arts for Healing and Justice Network. So seeing how work like that has grown, how we've been able to produce new research evaluation on it is just one example of the growth and change that has happened. But we also know that there are intangible benefits for bringing people together. So it's become much more understood, there's more awareness that arts and health go together. There's been incredible research that continues to grow with new findings about how does that actually work in the brain or in the body? What does that mean for medicine and for healthcare going forward? So that's been incredible to bring that kind of research to bear and into the room and share it with the arts field. And then we've had also demonstrations of what arts can look like in recovery. So not only recovery from a physical ailment, but recovery from a disaster like the wildfires and ways that arts and culture can help give people hope, create spaces or support young people who've been through traumatic experiences. So all of this is really an incredible opportunity to reflect not only on our work at LA County Department of Arts and Culture, but the broader field across LA county and across the nation.

B

Yeah, I was very moved to hear that LA County Department of Arts and Culture acted after the wildfires to try and bring the arts in almost immediately with various initiatives and grants and it goes without saying that everyone was affected by the wildfires. Some were almost destroyed by the wildfires. And Angelenos have faced a lot of other challenges in recent years, including the increased ice activity, the pandemic. How do you see the arts helping with the problems of life? Sometimes insurmountable problems?

D

Yeah. Well, there are many different ways to think about this. And I want to honor that culture and having artistic and creative expression and cultural practices helping knit us together, helping us express ourselves, but also connect us to our community or to our social networks and to our place, our sense of place, of home, of where we are and our sense of culture and belonging, that those are actually not new concepts. These are things that really human beings, native cultures, folks have been doing since time immemorial. But what we have now is we have true kind of policy language, we have data proving these things to be so. And we have a better understanding of even using a public health kind of a lens. Social determinants of health, meaning that it is your health outcomes are not based solely and only on your individual so of behavior. What food did you eat and what medicine did you take and how many times did you go to the doctor or not. They are also based on your environment, what access you had to arts, culture, recreation, what levels of kind of trauma that happen to be experiencing your community or your life. And that it turns out arts and culture is an extraordinary part of the sort of of toolkit, the human toolkit and the societal and civic toolkit that we have to help us through that, help us recover from those and help us to prevent also health challenges, keeping us healthy, dancing and singing, and all the great things that we can do for our physical health and our mental health and our greater well being.

B

That's so inspiring and it's so exciting to hear that more and more research has been done to really document how these things are true. It seems like those who attend this summit on Friday, June 12, can benefit not only as perhaps an individual professional artist looking at ways to express the importance of well being and to achieve well being, but even an organization to see how they can send out their tentacles and work with others. What do you expect to happen as a result of freedom the summit on Friday?

D

Well, 100%. If you are an arts and cultural organization, or if you are a health related organization that uses the arts or wants to learn more, or if you are any kind of community based organization serving young people or older folks or you know, really just trying to inspire healthy communities, this summit is for you and so we want to invite everybody at an organizational level, I think folks will be able to learn more about the state of the field and some of the research happening in the field. They'll be able to connect to possibly new partners or collaborators. And to the point you were making, it can help not only artists, but also arts organizations and health practitioners and entities to be able to better articulate and express and explain and understand that arts. Arts is a beneficial and worthy investment in the health of our patients, our constituents and our communities. I mean, we've seen, you know, a range of applications from truly arts in health care to also the idea of employee burnout, how to ensure that your employees have opportunities for greater well being or connection or relief on their jobs. And so there's really, in a way, no shortage to the future of this work. And this summit is just a phenomenal way of essentially field building, as we might call it, you know, helping to build the sector's capacity around this issue area. And so we, we really invite one and all to come and be part of the summit.

B

Thank you. Kristin Sakoda. It's so great to hear from your standpoint how important these issues are and how exciting the field is. Kristen Sakota, Director of the LA County Department of Arts and Culture. And she will be a big part of the Arts and Health week summit. Friday, June 12th. Thank you.

D

Wonderful. Thank you.

B

Next, I'm here with Nisha Sajnani, co director of the Jameel Arts and Health Laboratory and professor at NYU Steinhardt. Author and a leading figure in the area of drama therapy and arts and health in general. Her body of work explores the unique ways in which aesthetic experience can inspire equity, care and collective human flourishing across the lifespan. I love that description. Dr. Sajnani, what a pleasure to have you with us on the podcast.

E

Thank you so much for having me.

B

The Jameel Arts and Health Lab is a relatively new organization, but already very prominent in the field. Widely quoted, there is support from the World Health Organization here. That must have been no easy task. Tell us how that collaboration works.

E

So the lab was founded in 2023 to bring stronger evidence and coordination to a field that's growing very quickly but often remains fragmented. So we're a collaboration between New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, Culture Runners, the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and Community Jamil. So when we were founded, we were founded as collaborators with a mission to measurably improve lives through the arts, which we do through advancing research, through advancing policy, public engagement and capacity Building. So we focus on building the evidence base, on supporting scalable interventions and making sure that this work is taken seriously in health systems worldwide?

B

Yes, the worldwide emphasis is unique in this. Is this the first kind of initiative that's that broad?

E

To my knowledge, it's the first initiative of its kind. There are certainly extraordinary research labs around the world that we have networked as part of our mission in order to, to strengthen and lift up the findings that these researchers are discovering about the health benefits of the arts and also about why the arts are having the impacts that they do. But to our knowledge, it's the first time that there's been an entity to really unite that evidence base with excellent communications and public engagement and capacity building and strong policy outreach in order to translate those findings into meaningful, meaningful action.

B

Amazing work on such a global scale. Are there key messages that you're hearing from the different cities and countries that you're working with?

E

What I'm hearing the general public respond to most consistently across cities and countries is one, well, who knew that the arts were good for you?

F

Right?

E

And just, just an opening and awareness around, hey, did you, you know, can we think about the arts as a health resource? And the other thing that people are to referring, responding to is thinking about the arts as a health behavior. So, you know, you could think about your arts participation in the same way that you might think about diet or sleep or getting enough exercise that engaging in the arts is just good for your health.

B

I think we can all relate to that very well. As you mentioned, the Jameel Arts and Health Lab frequently works on policy briefs, really making things happen. And you've even addressed the health impacts of climate change and how it relates to the arts. Let's hear more about that.

E

Yes. So a lot of our work is focused on policy. How can we take research and general awareness and enthusiasm for this work and translate it into meaningful action across a number of different contexts, one of which is climate change, which is an issue that affects all of us. Right. So this particular policy brief looks at how the arts can help call attention to the health impacts of climate change and the emotional and psychological toll that it takes. So we highlight creative practices that can support community resilience, that can communicate complex climate science in accessible ways. The arts can make climate science tangible and audible. And arts practitioners, creative arts therapists, creative health practitioners, are also able to help people process GR and anxiety and uncertainty connected to climate change and its effects. So it's not about positioning the arts as decoration, but really as a core part of climate health action. And the policy brief highlights six case examples from around the world where we see artists doing this in connection to air pollution, in connection to water lines, and a whole host of other issues, heat exposure and what have you. And the case examples I find incredibly rich because they communicate to others what one can do. How can an artist see themselves as part of the solution in this space? I mean, who better than artists and creative storytellers to help us imagine better ways of living together and preserving people and planet?

B

So powerful. There's also work that you've done in the area of refugee trauma and the arts.

E

So I had started working with communities who had experienced displacement maybe 30 years ago. And I think that really goes back to the fact that my own family had experienced their own history of displacement, that my parents were refugees during the division of Pakistan and India, that they themselves had to relocate and remake home, and that that process of remaking home was a creative act, that remaking home meant considering what was worth preserving and what was beautiful and what was worth protecting and promoting in the next generation. And for my mother, that really was about poetry and it was about dance and it was about theater. And she gave me exposure to opportunities that she herself did not have time for in her childhood. And that very much stayed with me. Not only the arts, but attention to how the arts support a sense of home, a sense of belonging to myself and to the communities that I have the pleasure of interacting with. And I. I think I very much wanted to share that spirit with other communities who might be going through the same thing. And that led me to a number of creative projects in the area and ultimately had me working with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, where I share insights from that body of work each year.

B

You've mentioned in interviews the importance of your mother as an influence and how you grew up with this sense of. Because of the tradition, dance, drama, music, all together almost as one art form, which, of course, here at la Opera connects. We're very big on that concept of the arts coming together. But I think it shows what a wide perspective the summit on June 12th will have. It's not just about opera and Hill. It's about all of the arts. And that seems to be something innate with you.

E

I love how you pick that up. You know, it's actually deep in Indian philosophical tradition, in aesthetic theory, in Indian aesthetic theory, that we think about art not as separate entities. And I suppose Germans have the word Kunst, which might speak to this as well. So I don't know that it's specific to India, but in India, we might refer to it as Natya and Natya. Natya is dance, theater, music. And it's all together in the sense that these creative forms are our birthright and that we have access to them. And to assume that they only belong to a separate elite is to really cut ourselves off from a great source of joy.

B

I want to touch on another way that you're spreading the word about this powerful connection of health, wellness and the arts. The Jameel Arts and Health Lancet collection on arts and health that's coming soon. Let's hear about that.

E

Yes, we anticipate that publication to happen in September. The Jameel Arts and Health Lab Lancet collection on arts and health includes a brief synthesis of the evidence that we have insofar as how the arts affect us in everyday life. So just our everyday exposure to the arts, our ways of creating home beautiful, our gardening, our dressing, our culinary arts, our singing in the shower, are attending a play. Just the arts doing what they're doing. What is that doing for us? And then moving into an evidence summary around arts and public health and the ways in which the arts help people mobilize, clarify their concerns. But also when we think about arts prescribing, how we can create actual public health strategy for people to gain exposure to arts experiences because they can actually help them with their lung capacity or in a more directed way around Parkinson's disease and so on and so forth. Or because we understand that the evidence tells us that exposure to the arts even once a month can lower our rates of depression by 48%. So then we can really start to think about it like a public health strategy all the way to the arts as clinical care. And here we're talking about creative arts therapies or specific arts interventions in hospital hospitals. So the collection includes that evidence summary and then it points out what's missing, what's missing in the evidence base, what's missing in the policy landscape, and what do we need in order to really take this word from the page to the stage, so to speak? How do we move it into everyday care for how we care for ourselves, how we care for each other? And one other piece to this collection is a historic photo essay. It's the the first time that the Lancet will have published. They actually already published this part, so your listeners can actually look this part up already. But the photo essay for this collection includes 32 photographs that allow people to really visualize relationships between the arts and health. So there are 32 portals into how might we see this relationship? Does it look like palliative care in a museum context? Does it look like the use of healthcare clowns in a hospital or in a refugee camp? When we bring the arts into these care spaces, what is elevated, what is enabled?

B

I think it speaks to how powerful you see the arts and health that you are teaching a course called Can Art Save Lives?

E

Yes, I developed that course for NYU Abu Dhabi, one of our campuses, and it's taken by undergraduate students from around the world who are based there. And it's actually something we're going to be offering at the. At the New York campus as well. I teach a master's program in drama therapy, but there's been so much interest in just the health benefits of the arts overall that, you know, it led to the development of this course called Can Art Save Lives? Which ends with a question mark. And so students are invited to consider that question. And they. They read a lot in this area. They discover the evidence base. They critically analyze that evidence base in space. They look at films and photography and look at examples from their own lives and essentially come up with an answer to that question, which is typically an enthusiastic yes and yes, but. And they'll look at where and how and with who the arts have been effective and hopefully leave with generative questions that they can take forward into their future studies.

B

Thank you so much, Dr. Nisha Sajnani, for telling us a little bit about the amazing work you do locally, nationally, and on a global scale to bring together arts and health. Thank you.

E

Thank you.

B

Finally, we'll wrap things up with LA Opera Connects very own vice president, Andrea Fuentes. And first, Andrea, I want to congratulate you and LA Opera connects on the 5th annual Arts Health Week Summit. What an incredible achievement. My understanding is that you all have been working in this sector of arts and health for a long time. Can you tell us a little bit about the history here?

F

Sure. Thank you, Gail. It's always a joy to speak with you and a joy to talk about the work that we do in arts and health. It's been really, really meaningful for us to see the progress and the shape that it's taken over these many years. Of course, as a performing arts company, as an opera company, we've always believed in the transformative power of the arts, and of course, opera, especially for me, it's that it's such a multidisciplinary art form, so it engages all of your senses. It brings us together in one space to experience something together, which I think is really meaningful. And then because you're seeing something, you're hearing something, you're feeling something, and it's happening all together, and our heart rates begin to match, our breathing begins to match, we've always known that that is a really powerful, important aspect to opera and to live theater, but this helps us explore it a little bit more. So for 20 years, Connex has been doing this kind of work in hospitals and healthcare settings. We just wanted to bring a little bit of music and joy to people who might not be able to reach us downtown at the Music Center. And so from those origins just in, we want to just share music. We've learned from those experiences how meaningful that really can be in these settings. And so, you know, when you hear every day, this lifted me up, this elevated me, this changed how I felt, and I did feel better then. We wanted to understand that more and we wanted to really explore what's happening across the county, because we know there are lots of organizations and lots of collaborators and practitioners and artists doing this work. And so, in partnership with the County Board of Supervisors and particularly with the leadership of First District Supervisor Hilda L. Solis and the Department of Arts and Culture and the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, we created a convening and that became the LA County Arts and Health Week Summit. So it's really been, you know, a 20 year exploration of what can we do with this art form and what does it really do for us in these moments where we all feel changed or we all feel like we're uplifted and finding something new for ourselves, or returning to a moment that was so meaningful? What is that and how do we talk about it and learn to create very specific outcomes? Is that possible? And that's what the summit is about.

B

I have a personal experience of some of the work you did well before five years ago and the Arts and Health Week Summit. As a news reporter at knx, I covered a story about LA Opera Connects. You had embedded a teaching artist in a home for foster kids either aged out of the system or not quite fitting into the system. These kids kind of in limbo. And this teaching artist, Karen Hogle Brown, not only taught the kids vocal training for a period of weeks, but help them create an opera that they performed. And in all my career, which goes on for many decades, this was the story that I think had the most profound effect on me to see the joy in the eyes of those kids and the impact that this had on them. And my only challenge was I kept crying and you're not supposed to cry when you're a hard edged journalist telling this story. But anyway, bravo to you and your team for all the work you've done in so many settings. Too many to mention. Were you expecting when you first had this vision of a convening that it would have not only a local impact, but a statewide impact, a national impact and an international impact? And that Renee Fleming would jump in and become so passionate about what you're doing and this sector, this field.

F

Well, thank you, thank you for that. I mean, for sharing that story. Even as you were describing it, I was like, oh no, I'm not going to cry now. But so I know exactly what you mean. It did start with Renee Fleming's leadership. So she has been a leader in this field of arts and health for quite some time. And there have been like many convenings where we were talking with some of our arts and health partners with Renee Fleming a few years prior to the summit. And so from those even early explorations, we'll call them like the Proto Summit, maybe even from those moments, we knew that this was a really powerful way to engage others around the arts and the impact that the arts can have in our lives. When you have someone who is a star like Renee Fleming is to the operatic world, when she says, I see this and this is important and this is something that I want to, you know, dedicate a part of my life to, it really does speak to how important that has been and the power and impact that it can have. And so I think her leadership has been so important, instrumental and has provided us with the guidance that we really needed to create the summit and to something that would become at this level. And for my part, I always knew that this was important work, but I'm so glad to see that it's being so well received at these levels and to see that there are so many people and practitioners and artists and researchers who know that this is important and want to support it. And so to create spaces for people to come together to talk about it in a really meaningful, substantive way where people come away saying, I learned something, I gathered something, I found something that I can use. That's what it's all about. So I'm really, really glad that that's the trajectory of what is happening here. Because I couldn't imagine a better outcome than people saying in some other part of the country or some other part of the world, oh, I found this and I can use this for myself and for the people around me.

B

That's the goal we mentioned national impact. I gather that you've touched base with Opera America. Tell us a little bit about what's going on there.

F

We're very proud to work with Opera America and to partner with them in various initiatives in various ways. And they invited me to speak about the Arts and Health Summit at their 2025 conference. It's a national conference, and so I was very happy to do that and to talk about the work that we're doing here. And my hope and goal for those kinds of conversations is that other opera companies and other arts companies find opportunities to explore this work in their locations. And what I found from those conversations was that they're having very similar outcomes that people say, you know, this changed my life. I felt better, I felt more connected. And so giving them some resources and getting resources in return that we can point to, here's research, here's a new initiative, here's a new collaboration happening in this space. Here's a new model that you might be able to use where teaching artists are doing this kind of work, and we're evaluating it in this way for this kind of outcome. All of those conversations are incredibly generative for us as a network of opera companies, and also for the Connex team and for LA Opera, because we can see how the model could be used or how it could be changed and what could come out of it. So my goal for those kinds of conversations is to hopefully be part of the momentum to move these conversations forward in a way where people are saying, oh, this is, again, something that is meaningful and I can use. I'm really, really proud of the way that LA Opera has continued to support those conversations. And it also tells me that the field really sees the impact of the arts as being central to the mission. Why we create art? Why is live art important? Why do we need to support it? It's part of our lives, it's part of our creativity. It's part of all of those beautiful things when you're sitting in a theater and you're hearing beautiful music. But there's more to it than that, that we can continue to explore. And thanks to science, we can explore it. So for me, it's the best of both worlds. My background is in science and music and education, but I still really, I think, continue to things in a scientific lens. And so this feels like a dream to me to be able to have both of those worlds meet.

B

I want to give the web address register for free@laopera.org summit. We haven't mentioned the Community Resource Fair, which is part of the event as well, in the morning through the early afternoon. And what's that all about?

F

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. Let me tell you a little bit about what the week is and a little bit about the summit itself. So it's a little bit of a lengthy week this year. The LA County Arts and Health Week is going to start on June 5, and it will end on June 13, 2026, with activities throughout LA County. And if people are curious, they can find more information@laopera.org summit and they can also register for the Summit, which is on Friday, June 12, 2026, and that will be here at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center Downtown. It is a day that brings together learning, connection, participation. You'll hear from leaders in research, healthcare, government and the arts, alongside interactive workshops and a Resource fair. So the Resource Fair is a collection of organization and government entities that will provide you with information at the intersection of arts and health. So everything at the summit is free to register is free, attendance is free. We hope that you can come and enjoy the free resources that are available to you and information about how you can find other ways to engage in the arts. So that's the goal of the Resource Fair. All of the organizations are providing more information about what they do and how you can get involved and benefit from what they do and what they provide.

B

So inspiring. Thank you for that. Looking at the Summit on Friday, June 12, what do you hope that folks will come away with?

F

Yeah, thank you for that question. I think for LA Opera, we're hoping that people have access to what arts participation offers across their whole lives. We want communities where creativity, expression and human connection are understood as parts of their humanity, and that the arts can play a really impactful space in our lives. Real success looks like people feeling seen and connected and inspired and able to take part in the cultural lives of their communities. And the Summit is one way that we're able to work toward that. And it's been really, really meaningful and important for us to have a partnership with the Department of Arts and Culture, as well as the County Board of Supervisors office, in particular the office of Hilda El Solis, who has been so instrumental in creating this initiative and in their partnership in bringing this to our communities.

B

And I want to make clear that individual artists and healthcare professionals are welcome, as well as representative of arts groups, healthcare professionals. It's really an exciting convening. I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Again, we've heard from NEA's Sunil Iyengar, earlier on the podcast who detailed some of the incredible data that is coming out of their work. Not just their work. Look at what USC Brain and Creativity Institute is doing to tell the story of how concrete some of these embedded. Looking back over five years, what are you most excited about in terms of the ability to document that work and how the word has spread?

F

It is incredible and they do incredible work. What I'm most excited about is that as I mentioned earlier, we all know when you hear a song on the radio that you like or when you are sitting in a theater, or a few like ballet, if you like to paint all of those things, they create a feeling in you. What does that feeling do and how does it make us feel differently? Like how. How do you measure that? And there thankfully are people who do exactly that. They measure these impacts, they measure how it gets created, they measure what can change to adjust that outcome. And those outcomes can be, you know, very small, minuscule changes to something much more impactful to our everyday sense of our well being and our health. For me to know that there are outcomes that are absolutely clinically observed to our cognitive function, to how we're able to respond emotionally and think about ourselves in a healthier way, all of those outcomes I think are incredible because when you're sitting and experiencing opera or whatever art form it is that you enjoy, there are moments of respite and transformation. And I think that whatever we can do to help substantiate that and to help understand it so that we can think about it not only as a physical experience, but as a. A mental experience, to realize that something is actually really changing here in you. I think that that's helpful for those of us who already love the arts and for those of us who maybe don't have as much interest in the arts, to see that there's all of this importance benefit to being part of an artful life. I think Recently I heard Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson and speaking about how her goal was to have people live artful lives and what that means for me to understand that fully. This is an important part of that, the research and the measurement and the grounding for LA Opera. It's important for us to understand these research and impacts because it helps us tailor our programs. Of course, our main stage productions are many beautiful canonical works and some new productions. But for LA Opera Connects, we do work specifically with healthcare organizations and hospitals and senior centers and to have our programs more grounded in these kinds of research that's available now widely, it's really helpful for us to know what's possible.

B

Well, your passion for arts and health is very palpable. I want to give a shout out to your relatively tiny team Bionic Team. Realizing so many of these initiatives that you've dreamed up, I just am incredulous. If anyone wants to check out the LA Opera Connects tab@laopera.org, you'll see what I mean. Initiatives in schools for teachers at the Pavilion, community operas, public simulcast with performances at the Music center and on and on. How do they do that?

F

We have an incredible team, LA Opera is of course an incredible company and we do a lot. And I'm really proud that our mission is to create opera and accessibility to opera, and that's been a founding principle, is that we want to be part of the civic infrastructure and the cultural fabric of Los Angeles. And that's where connext comes in, is that we are the delivery system for that original mission. And the Connext team itself is an incredible group of people who are very mission driven. They want the access and the possibility for the people around us in our communities. We want the best possible work that we can do and I think it's driving from that. Why? And a lot of hard work and a lot of long days. And the summit, of course, is no exception to that. It's a huge collaborative effort and we are proud to do it well.

B

Thank you for all that you do in spreading the joy of music and the health benefits of the arts. Very excited about this Arts and Health Week. And again, to register for free and enjoy this incredible opportunity, go to laopera.orgsummit thank you so much Andrea.

F

Thank you, Gail. It's always a joy to speak with you.

A

Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to behind the Curtain wherever you listen to podcasts and share this episode with your friends on your favorite social media. Did you know that as a nonprofit, LA Opera relies on charitable donations from arts lovers just like you? Learn more about how your support brings our stage to life@laopra.org donate we can't wait to see you at the Opera.