Advisory Committee

Arts and Health Australia's vision is steered and informed by a national and international advisory committee of experts in the field.

Margret Meagher - Founding Director: Founding AHA director, Margret Meagher, has worked in arts management, business development, events and marketing communications for over 40 years. The last decade she has dedicated to the growing specialist area: arts and health, with a particular interest in the impact of culture on mental health and healthy ageing. She has written extensively on the subject, and from 2004-6 edited arts+medicine journal, circulated nationally to 50,000 doctors.; Margret regularly presents on arts and health. In North America, she has presented at the Society for Arts in Healthcare international conferences in Edmonton (2005), Chicago (2006), Nashville (2007), Philadelphia (2008) and Buffalo (2009), Minnesota (2010), San Francisco (2011) and Detroit (2012). At 22nd annual SAH conference in San Francisco in 2011, Margret was one of twenty people, out of a field of three hundred, to received an inaugural Distinguished Fellowship Award for her contribution to the international arts and health sector.; Speaking engagements in Australia include the National Rural Health Alliance Conferences (2007, 2009 and 2011) and the ArtsHealth Center for Research and Practice conferences at the University of Newcastle (2008, 2009). The arts and ageing was the subject of Margret’s presentations at the International Federation on Ageing 10th Global Conference in Melbourne (2010) and the University of Griffith’s Creative Communities conference on the Gold Coast, Queensland (2010).; Margret has participated on the judging panel in the category of ‘Use of Art in the Patient Environment’ in the International Academy Design & Health Awards (2010, 2011) and presented at the Academy's Design and Health Australasia 2011 in Melbourne in May 2011 on the subject of Healthy People, Healthy Communities: The Role of the Arts.; Margret has advised medical colleges on how doctors can utilise the arts to enhance communication skills and achieve lifestyle balance, and was a member of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Research Foundation Board between 2005 and 2010.. She contributed to the Churchill Fellowship Trust’s Arts NSW judging panel from 2006 to 2010. In 2011, Margret was appointed a member of the NSW Ministerial Advisory Committee on Ageing and chairs a sub-committee on creative ageing. She is co-editing two online journals on community arts and health and creative ageing with the UNESCO Observatory, University of Melbourne and is a member of the editorial board of the Arts and Health Journal of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare.; Margret is working with the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW to establish the Chair of Arts and Health and is establishing an international network of researchers in the field of arts and health.
Adriane Boag: Adriane Boag is a Program Coordinator at the National Gallery of Australia with responsibility for developing and delivering access programs for youth and community groups. Adriane has a Visual Arts degree with Honours in Painting and Sculpture from Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney Australia. Adriane has over twenty years teaching experience in tertiary and museum visual art education. Adriane coordinates regular tours for a wide variety of specialised audiences including people living with dementia and is the facilitator of the Art and Alzheimer's' Program at the National Gallery of Australia. In 2009 support from the Department of Health & Ageing made possible the development and delivery of the Art and Alzheimer's Outreach Program. The Outreach Program's aims and objectives support sustainable regionally specific programs in galleries for people living with Dementia. A two day training workshop for arts and health professionals has been developed from the experience gained within the current Art and Alzheimer's Program at the National Gallery.; Additional Special Access programs are an established feature of Learning and Access planning and programming. A focus of her Gallery work with youth is the National Gallery of Australia and National Australia Bank Summer Art Scholarship, an annual week long art immersion program for sixteen year 11 students selected from each state and territory of Australia.
Dr John Boulton: John Boulton is a paediatric clinician and academic from Newcastle, NSW. He has a commitment to informing Medicine with insights from the disciplines of anthropology and history under the rubric of Medical Humanities. This extends to advocacy of the benefit of ArtsHealth practice within Aboriginal health, and developing strategies for the implementation of such programmes.; John graduated from Edinburgh University in 1969 and after his internship in Africa and Edinburgh, commenced postgraduate training in paediatrics in Perth. He gained his specialist qualification and commenced his medical research career at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. He continued his academic career at the Adelaide Children's Hospital before being appointed in 1980 as the Foundation Professor of Paediatrics at Newcastle University. There he developed the tertiary Paediatrics and Child Health service from which emerged the John Hunter Children's Hospital in the early 1990s. After a variety of mid-career pioneering positions he was appointed as Foundation Professor of Medical Practice at the University of Newcastle at the new Central Coast clinical school.; From mid-2005 John has worked in the remote Kimberley region of northwest Western Australia as senior regional paediatrician. There he has developed a unique model of child health service to remote Aboriginal communities, including working in partnership with Aboriginal NGOs for the amelioration of the life situation of the high percentage of the childhood population suffering the effects of early life trauma and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.; In Sept 2005 he organized the Arts Health conference in Newcastle: "Re-framing Health: Practices of Art and Humanities with Health." This created sufficient interest in the topic at the time for a movement to establish the short-lived Arts Health Centre for Research and Practice which was launched at a conference in Oct 2008.; In 2008 he helped to initiate the Start Right, Live Long project of the use of art to engage Gamilaraay Aboriginal women in their antenatal health in Tamworth. This grew into the highly successful Gomeroi Gaaynggal Programme in which research into the prenatal antecedents to risk of future renal and cardiovascular disease are funded by the NH&MRC, and the ArtsHealth side is funded by the Thyne Reid Foundation.; John undertook the Masters of Medical Humanities at Sydney University with the focus on Social Anthropology as it relates to Aboriginal society. His academic writing, publications, and presentations, focus on the liminal zone between anthropology and medicine, and how this can inform an understanding of the origins of the appalling health status of Aboriginal children in remote communities. He has honorary academic appointments at the Centre for Values, Ethics and Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, and at the University of Newcastle.; In 2011 John was awarded the Howard Williams Medal of the Division of Paediatrics of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in recognition of his contribution to the improvement of children's health.
Elaine Burke: Elaine Burke is a healthcare professional and independent arts consultant. She developed and held the post of Arts and Health Manager within both the Hull and East Yorkshire Primary Care Trusts and the Humber Mental Health Trust for 7 years until October 2008. This post was unique in the UK, establishing a senior management role to place arts and health at the core of NHS service delivery, receiving national and international recognition for its innovation in the sector. Elaine developed a wide range of arts and health initiatives, and headed up a team of arts and health practitioners to deliver health promotion and public health programmes for vulnerable groups, including: young people in care, prison inmates, carers, young offenders, teenage boys, young adults with first episode psychosis, adults with learning disabilities and adult / older adult mental health service users. Other significant project strands include arts in healthcare environments – both hospital and primary care. Initially trained as an art psychotherapist, Elaine was Head of Art Therapy for Children’s Services in NHS Hull and East Yorkshire for 6 years, before moving onto her role as Arts and Health Manager. Elaine now works as a freelance specialist consultant across a variety of arts programmes - encompassing health, social, community, evaluation, place-making, tourism and arts development. She brokers projects and relationships between arts and non-arts sectors. Most recently, she developed the national award-winning cultural tourism project 'Larkin with Toads'. She is interested in big change, big impacts and high quality; and she believes that the arts are just the thing to make it happen.
Molly Carlile: Molly Carlile is Manager of Palliative Care Services at Austin Health and has recently been appointed inaugural Manager of Arts in Healthcare for the Olivia Newton John Cancer and Wellness Centre, also at Austin Health.; Molly calls herself the “Deathtalker”. She lives her motto “The more we talk, the less we fear” by encouraging informed conversations about death and grief in the community. To this end Molly has embraced the arts as a vehicle for creating a safe space for people to have these conversations and as a result has become a regular media commentator, author and playwright.; Her books, “Jelly Bean’s Secret” and “Sometimes Life Sucks” have been widely used to introduce the concept of death to children and to address the complex needs of young adults. The plays she has written with Alan Hopgood “Four Funerals in One Day” and “The Empty Chair” explore death, euthanasia and dementia and both continue to tour widely.; Molly was the recipient of a 2008 Churchill Fellowship, recipient of the inaugural Arts and Health Australia Award for Health Promotion and was recently presented with the International Journal of Palliative Nursing, Educator of the Year Award in London.; She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing Australia, Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Associate Fellow of the Australian College of Health Service Managers.
Gabriella Carroll: As Conference Chair Gabriella has assisted Arts and Health Australia since 2009. She is passionate about people embracing diversity through knowledge, understanding and respect, which she promotes as key influences on individual and community wellbeing. She is a qualified and experienced social worker, clinician, educator and manager and has honed her expertise in a diverse range of settings over the past 35 years. These include Health and Community based services, in particular Mental Health, Rehabilitation and Aged Care. In Local Government her experience is in Managing Community and Cultural Development in regional NSW and Child Protection for Children with Disabilities in the UK. Throughout her practice she has advocated for access and equity and promoted the importance of being connected to culture.
Dr Gary Christenson: Dr Gary Christenson is Chief Medical Officer of Boynton Health Service on the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities Campus where his is also an adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has special expertise in college mental health, impulsive and compulsive disorders, and the interface of the arts and medicine. Dr. Christenson chairs Boynton's Art Committee, which oversees an arts program featuring special exhibitions, a permanent collection of art centered on the artistic achievements of University alumni, students, staff, and faculty, as well as live musical performances in coordination with the University's Music Therapy Program. Dr. Christenson is the current president of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, an international organization committed to education, advocacy, and research promoting the arts contributions to health and healing. Dr. Christenson chaired the host committee of the Society's Conference in Minneapolis in 2010. He is also the immediate past co-chair of the Midwest Arts in Healthcare Network. He is a regularly featured speaker at the The Art of Good Health and Wellbeing conference held annually in Australia. His article "Why We Need the Arts in Medicine" was featured in the July 2011 issue of Minnesota Medicine, the journal of the Minnesota Medical Association.
Dr Ian Darnton-Hill AO: Dr Ian Darnton-Hill is an international leader in public health and nutrition, particularly in relation to developing countries, and is adjunct professor at Tufts University in Boston and the University of Sydney.; Working in the Human Nutrition Unit at Sydney University from 1978 to 1986, Ian coordinated the graduate Dietetics course and taught in the Masters of Public Health. Concurrently Ian was conducting research specifically concerned in community projects, with school children and teenagers, and Aboriginals.; A special project of Ian's was on the nutritional and social state of homeless men in Sydney, the results of which appeared in his MSc (Med) thesis. His data on the thiamine status of homeless men was one of the major pieces of evidence underlying mandatory fortification of bread with thiamine in Australia in 1991.; Ian moved overseas in 1987 and worked as Assistant Director in Research for Helen Keller International in Bangladesh where he was involved with prevention of Vitamin A deficiency. Shortly afterward in 1989, Ian was appointed WHO Medical Officer for Non-Communicable Diseases in Fiji before becoming WHO Regional Adviser in Nutrition for the Western Pacific between 1990 and 1995. He then moved to New York to work in International Management with Opportunities for Micronutrient Interventions (OMNI) from 1995 to 1998.; Appointed Vice President for Programs and Director of Health and Nutrition at Helen Keller International's head office between 1998 - 2001, Ian then became Senior Global Health Leadership Fellow with WHO working on Nutrition and Non-Communicable Disease Prevention, and their emerging Global Strategy. Until 2009 he was senior Nutrition administrator at UNICEF in New York and until recently, he was Acting Director of Nutrition at the UNICEF head office. His final position at UNICEF was as Special Adviser to the Executive Director on Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition.; Ian has worked in many developing and least developed countries including Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Myanmar, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. His work has been widely published in international publications.; Ian has been working in recent times as a consultant to a number of health organizations including AusAid, UNICEF, World Bank and WHO. He has a strong personal interest in the arts and the impact of culture on health and wellbeing, especially as manifested through dietary practices and the epidemic of obesity and the noncommunicable diseases.
David Doyle: David is the Executive Director of DADAA, Western Australia, an Arts organisation dedicated to Arts for Social Change that has over the past 16 years been at the forefront of the Australian Arts and Disability movement.; David has worked across Australia, Hong Kong, Kenya and Ireland to extend cultural participation for people with disabilities and mental illness. David Holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (ANU), Graduate Diploma of Education (ECU) and is an accredited Partnership Broker through PBAS UK. David is the Editor of Proving the Practice - evidencing the effects of community arts on mental health, he has written widely on Arts and Health practice in Australia.; As an arts worker throughout the 1990’s David focused on regional Community Arts and Cultural Development projects and Disability Arts Festivals with a focus on cultural inclusion. David was awarded the National Arts and Health Leadership Award in 2009 for his work in the Australian Arts and Health sectors and the Western Australian State Arts Business Leadership Award for his work in sustainable partnerships, between communities, the business and Arts sectors.
Kim McConville: Kim McConville is the co-founder and Executive Director of Beyond Empathy and has been working with Aboriginal communities for twenty-three years. Kim has used arts, culture and community development practices to influence change and to increase health, wellbeing, education and learning outcomes for young people and their families whose lives have been disrupted by disadvantage. Kim has extensive expertise in facilitating collaborative practices across government, corporate, philanthropic and community sectors.; Kim has a background in education specialising in Aboriginal studies and behaviour disorders. For twenty-one years Kim has worked with Aboriginal communities in New South Wales; including five years in Aboriginal education research and policy development with the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group; the New South Wales Board of Studies and Tranby Aboriginal College; writing the first fully accredited Aboriginal Studies course for Indigenous students with Aboriginal activist and leader, Jack Beetson.; From 1997 until 2004, Kim lived in northern New South Wales initiating and delivering arts, community and cultural development projects independently and with the national arts company Big hART. Kim has also worked on similar projects in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.; In 2006 Kim was awarded Social Entrepreneur of the year for her work with Beyond Empathy. In 2010 Beyond Empathy won the category award for Arts and Health in Regional and Rural Australia, in the annual Arts and Health Australia Awards for Excellence. This recognition was followed by Kim McConville winning the award for National Leadership in Arts and Health in the 2011 Arts and Health Awards for Excellence, announced at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra on 16 November.
Carrie McGee: Carrie McGee is an educator in Community and Access Programs in the Department of Education at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA has won international respect for its unique efforts to make the Museum's extensive resources, collection and programs accessible to marginalised communities. Carrie develops programs for audiences with special needs and disabilities. Often in collaboration with community and health care organizations, these programs serve diverse audiences including individuals with physical, developmental, or learning disabilities; hospitalized children and adults; homebound individuals; blind and partially sighted visitors; individuals who have been incarcerated; cancer survivors; individuals with mental illness; and people with Alzheimer's disease and their caregivers. MoMA's programs are founded on the belief that engagement with art can impact health and healing, and the understanding that cultural institutions have a unique opportunity in their capacity to facilitate that engagement. Carrie also teaches a seminar at the Museum for medical students from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare.
Clive Parkinson: Clive Parkinson is the Director of Arts for Health. Based at Manchester Metropolitan University, it is the longest established organisation of its sort. Clive is a passionate advocate for culture and the arts and is constantly striving to further understand the potential impact of the arts on public health, particularly in light of the ongoing global financial downturn. Responding to this crisis, he has been working with artists, health practitioners and free-thinkers to explore shared thinking and action around contemporary practice and has produced a manifesto for arts, health and wellbeing; which in turn has influenced the development of the National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing, National Charter. He will be chairing the National Alliance leading into Culture, Health and Wellbeing International Conference in Bristol June 2013.; He is currently working on research around dementia and imagination, and involved in arts/health development work in Italy, France, Lithuania and Turkey. Building on his paper at the 2012 international conference in Canberra, he is working towards an exhibition and series of events that explore the role of culture and the arts in relation to conversations about death and dying. The exhibition '...Imagining Death', will be held in Manchester, Bogota and Vilnius in 2013.; As a visual artist, he worked in a hospital for people with learning difficulties whilst undertaking a degree at Lancaster University focusing on the relationship between creativity, culture, the arts and health. Employed variously by the NHS and voluntary sector, Clive has led on mental health promotion for an NHS Trust and managed day services for people affected by schizophrenia in the Northern seaside town of Morecambe. He regularly blogs at: artsforhealthmmu.blogspot.co.uk
Elizabeth Rogers: Elizabeth joined Regional Art NSW as the Chief Executive Officer in December, 2006. Since that time she has developed and implemented a new strategic direction for the organisation focusing on its role as a peak body and service agency for arts and cultural development across rural and regional areas of the state. She works closely with the state wide network 14 regional arts boards and acts as an advocate for the network with the state and federal governments. Elizabeth travels extensively throughout the state giving support to the regional development officers and gaining first hand information about many of the challenges facing regional communities as well as seeing the great arts and cultural projects produced in the regions.; Elizabeth has a very broad base of arts management and arts marketing experience gained in over 20 years work in the field in both metropolitan and regional areas. She moved to Regional Arts NSW from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she was Manager, Marketing & Communications for two years. In that time she developed and implemented key marketing and communications strategies. Previously, she was the Director of Canberra Arts Marketing for six and a half years. This was a unique role where she represented a large diversity of arts organisations making up Australia's leading arts marketing consortium.; Elizabeth has worked as an arts marketer, arts manager, publicist, festival director and presenter, as an employee as well as freelance, for a wide diversity of performing arts organisations since the early eighties.
Alice Thwaite: Alice is Director of Development of Equal Arts and has been a pioneer in the field of arts and older people for 20 years. Equal Arts is based in Gateshead in the North East of England and is one of only three arts organisations in the UK that specialises in work with older people across art forms. A small team contract a variety of professional artists to work on 12 - 14 projects each year. Alice has managed over 100 projects (raising over #3 million ) in a wide variety of venues including hospitals, residential care homes, arts venues and day centres. She was consulted by the Royal Commission on Long Term Care and sits on the Board of Years Ahead, the regional Forum on Ageing, working strategically to include the arts into mainstream ageing policy.; Recent projects include Knitted Lives, an exhibition of 3D knitting created by women from Newcastle which toured all over the North East was seen by over 40,000 people; Art on Prescription, a social prescribing project funded by the NHS for people experiencing the early signs of dementia; Sing for Life a project involving care staff looking at ways to support singing in residential care homes.; Alice is passionate about enabling older people to have access to participatory arts programmes and in 2010 received a Winston Churchill Fellowship which enabled her to travel to Ireland and the US looking at models of good practice. She has been asked to sit on the selection panel for future Churchill Fellows in the arts and older people category and is keen to be part of the development of national and international networks of organisations working in the field.
Mike White: Mike is Senior Research Fellow in Arts and Health at the Centre for Medical Humanities and St. Chad's College, University of Durham, UK. He studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, but ran away from an early career in academia to explore pioneering arts initiatives in social justice. He has been involved in arts in health work since 1988 when he set up the first arts in primary care project in the UK at Brierley Hill. His work for the Centre for Medical Humanities has included nurturing arts in health projects in schools and communities, workforce development programmes in creativity in healthcare, project-based evaluations, and audits and literature reviews of arts in health for Government agencies. He is currently developing the arts in health component of an inter-disciplinary 5-year research programme in medical humanities, funded by major grant from the Wellcome Trust, which explores the question "what makes for human flourishing?"; In 2005, Mike was awarded a fellowship of the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts to research community-based arts in health and build national/international links in this field. A resulting book Arts Development in Community Health - a social tonic was published by Radcliffe in 2009, and in June 2010 Mike convened the first international 'critical mass' meeting to set up ongoing exchanges of research and practice. He holds the Royal Society for Public Health Award 2011 for 'innovative and outstanding contribution to arts addressing health inequalities - practice and research'. He is currently collaborating with Peter Wright (Murdoch University) and Brad Haseman (QUT) on an Australia Research Council research study into the characteristics of community-based arts in health practice. Mike is also editing a special issue of the journal Arts & Health and, with Margret Meagher, a UNESCO Observatory E-journal - both of these publications, for release in 2013, focus on international arts and health practice and research.; Mike was previously at Gateshead Council where he developed many arts in health and arts for older people projects, as well as public art commissions such as the landmark Angel of the North by Antony Gormley. He has also worked as Development Director of the influential celebratory theatre company Welfare State International, and a long time ago he was a founder member of WOMAD, the international music festival agency. He has many published articles and has lectured widely on arts in health at universities and conferences in the UK, several EC countries, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Canada and USA. Mike represents the North East region of England in the UK's new National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing.; Mike now also runs an independent consultancy, Common Knowledge, with long-time artist colleague Mary Robson. Common Knowledge is a project management, learning development and programme advisory service for effective workforce training in arts in health, social pedagogy in schools, and international collaborations in practice and research.
Peter Wright: Dr Peter Wright is Senior Lecturer in Education and Arts Education and Research Methods Academic Chair, Research and Postgraduate Studies, School of Education, Faculty Arts, Education & Creative Media at Murdoch University. His research interests include teaching, learning and healing in, through, and with the arts; artistically-based approaches to educational research; culture, creativity and community development; drama education; applied theatre; transformational learning and teacher development in the arts; and Playback Theatre.; Peter currently coordinates and teaches in Primary Arts Education curriculum units, postgraduate Arts Education units and Qualitative Research Methods. Peter is an active researcher and is currently involved with two projects with Big hART a social impact of the Arts Company. He has contributed to a number of externally funded research projects including funding through the National Youth Affairs Research Scheme. He was project director for the DEST/Australia Council funded National Review of Education in Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Education. Peter has supervised or co-supervised theses in a range of areas with topics including the intersection of the arts with religious education and environmental education, graffiti and 'legal' walls, performance art as a tool for education, the development of mentor relationships in the training of musicians, arts education and the practicing visual artist, adult learning in the professional theatre, and an exploration of bi-cultural identity through the Arts.; Peter is a member of the International Arts Education Research Network (Australia Council for the Arts/UNESCO), and the UNESCO LEA (Links to Education and Art) International Network of Experts in Arts Education. Most recently Peter acted as an editor for a special themed issue of "Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung" (Forum: Qualitative Social Research) on Performative Social Science.