Find out more about the Speakers attending the Creative Lives Conference:
Kiz Bangerh
I lost my older sister, Promila, in a car accident in 2000. After, I suffered a delayed traumatised grief reaction. I was an English Literature graduate and keen writer but experienced a creative block that lasted ten years. During this time, I trained as a secondary English teacher, and enjoyed a fruitful career in museum and gallery education. When my father died in 2010, I was in recovery from a delayed traumatised grief reaction and a breakdown. This is when I discovered therapeutic writing. My writer’s block came undone. I already had an MA in Literature and decided to do an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes to share what I’d learnt about self-healing through creativity. I set up Hip Hop HEALS, a mental health project that tackles mental health inequalities in disadvantaged groups, particularly Minority Ethnic groups, young people and men. We deliver poetry therapy-style workshops in schools, probation centres, mental health units and homeless hostels. Recently, I was selected for Lloyd's Bank's School for Social Entrepreneurs to develop Hip Hop HEALS into a social enterprise business. Through this, I’ve been developing mental health resources using Hip Hop’s central tenet: ‘Knowledge of Self’. I aim to develop a mental health arts on prescription scheme, utilising the therapeutic power of Hip Hop culture. My goal is to spread knowledge and research about the therapeutic power of Hip Hop culture.
Lorna Collins
Lorna Collins (chair) is an artist, writer and Research Fellow at University College London. Her active research in arts and health began from her PhD, where she was a triple scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge University. She writes articles in several newspapers and journals. Lorna has done a TEDx talk, ‘How Creativity Revived Me’, which tells her life story and vocation, with the arts.
Dr. Errol Francis
Dr. Errol Francis is artistic director and CEO of Culture&. Errol studied photography and fine art at Central Saint Martin’s, University of the Arts London. His doctoral research at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London focused on postcolonial artistic responses to museums.
Errol’s background in mental health activism has influenced his arts practice such as his role as head of arts at the Mental Health Foundation and his directing of the Anxiety Arts Festival 2014, Cyborgs 2019 and his work in the curatorial research group PS/Y. Errol is currently content producer for the Culture Box research project at the University of Exeter which promotes social interaction and public health through the arts in the time of Covid-19 for people living with dementia in care homes. He is visiting lecturer at the University of Greenwich, Goldsmith’s University of London and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
Professor Helen Chatterjee, MBE (Chair)
Professor Helen Chatterjee, MBE (chair) is a Professor of Biology in UCL Biosciences and UCL Arts & Sciences. Her research includes biodiversity conservation, cultural and natural value, object-based learning, and evidencing the impact of natural and cultural participation on health. She co-founded the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance, is an advisor to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts and Health, Chairs the Royal Society for Public Health’s SIG in Arts and Health, and serves on the IUCN Section on Small Apes. Her interdisciplinary research has won a range of awards including a Special Commendation from Public Health England for Sustainable Development and most recently the 2018 AHRC-Wellcome Health Humanities Medal and Leadership Award. She received an MBE in 2015 for Services to Higher Education and Culture. Helen has written four books including ‘Material Connections: From Object-Based Learning to Object-Based Well-being’ (Taylor Francis, 2020) and over 50 research articles.
Aarathi Prasad
Aarathi Prasad is a writer, broadcaster, and researcher, with an academic background in genetics. Her writing has explored the intersection of science and technology with people, ideas, history, health, and environment. At UCL, her research centres on urban health and public engagement with science in Kenya, where she works on solutions for sustainable waste management in informal settlements.
Jumana Emil Abboud
Jumana Emil Abboud (born Shefa-'Amr, Galilee, 1971) works with drawing, installation, video and performance, exploring personal and collective memory, loss, longing and belonging. Inspired by the cultural landscape of her home, Abboud draws on the traditions of Palestinian folklore and myth-making by collecting stories and fairy tales. Investigating these story telling practices and oral histories, vis-a-vis their connection to natural water sources and forms of enchantment, the artist provides new interpretations for the tales she has discovered. Jumana is undergoing a practice-led PhD at Slade School of Fine Art. Photo by Colin Davison, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Dr Humera Iqbal (Chair)
Dr Humera Iqbal (chair) is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology based in the Social Research Institute at University College London. She studies migrant and minority family life and practices, social identity, and parenting across generations. Her work also explores the role of cultural participation in health and wellbeing. Humera uses mixed methods, arts and film-based approaches in her research.
Gilly Angell
Gilly Angell: Art allows for collaboration over many disciplines.
My insight into the role of art in the hospital environment and how the NHS approaches Death and Dying deepened in 2007 when I was diagnosed with AML subsequently having a bone marrow transplant in 2008. In all I was to spend 11 months as an inpatient over an 18-month period. These experiences developed into a piece entitled Conversations on the Transformation of Death - How society facilitates positive death -medically, emotionally and spiritually. This is in tandem with my work as a yoga practioner, therapist and community activist. I was instrumental in setting up The LENS -a national organization who believes that every member of society will understand that access to creative and cultural opportunities is important for individual and collective wellbeing. In the years that have followed I have contributed to many policy committees to allow the lived experience to be at the centre of decision making including: UCLH Arts and Heritage Committee; advisory member of The National Centre of Creative Health; Contributor to the APPG on Creative Health and Wellbeing; London Cancer Haematology Board; UCLH Cancer Clinical Steering Group; UCLH Patient Experience Board ;National Patient and Public Involvement in Healthcare Science In Higher Education Working Group; Multi –disciplinary research project for Yoga and Lung Cancer.
Dr Ranjita Dhital
Dr Ranjita Dhital is a Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice at the University of Reading and has practised as an addiction-specialist pharmacist, community pharmacist and worked in public health. Ranjita leads the Health and Arts Research Initiative HARI and is a sculptor. Her research involves investigating how the arts can be applied to reduce alcohol harm in low- and high-resource settings, and health architecture, co-designing engaging health spaces. Ranjita is the Deputy Chair of the Royal Society for Public Health Arts Health and Wellbeing Special Interest Group , Co-chair of the University of Reading’s Staff Disability Network and co-leads the Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network.
Dr. Rochelle Burgess
Dr. Rochelle Burgess is a leading community health psychologist who specialises in community-based approaches to health. Her work studies the social and psychological dynamics of community engagement, using qualitative, participatory and transformative methodologies. She is a Lecturer in Global Health and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health at UCL. She is the founder and Director of UCL's Global Network on Mental Health and Child Marriage. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, member of the ESRC peer review college, UK Trauma Council, among other affiliations.
Thomas Kador (Chair)
Thomas Kador (chair) is Associate Professor (Teaching) on the UCL Arts & Sciences (BASc) programme with a background in archaeology and chemical engineering. His research and pedagogical interest include object-based learning, creative health, public and community-based approaches to heritage as well as everyday practice – especially movement, mobility and migration – in prehistory. He has lectured and published extensively on all of these topics, including two book books, one (together with Jim Leary) on movement and mobility in Neolithic Europe, and the other (together with Helen Chatterjee) on object-based learning and wellbeing. Thomas currently leads a research project on student wellbeing and experiential learning spaces and, in addition to the modules below, has been closely involved in the development of the MASc Creative Health.
Michael Chandler
Michael Chandler is CEO of Union Chapel Project, the charity that oversees both the Union Chapel venue, the Margins homeless project, and a growing and increasingly ambitious creative community programme. Michael is also founder and chair of Sierra Leone-based charity WAYout Arts, which empowers street youth through music, film and media; and previously ran the country-wide national residency programme at homeless Forum Theatre company Cardboard Citizens.
LaToyah Gill
LaToyah Gill is one of Union Chapel’s Creative Community Leaders, a group of people from the local community who have been training in creative facilitation skills. LaToyah has long been interested in how art can be a sociopolitical force of change. The opportunity to advance LaToyah’s advocacy of the arts and interest in challenging systemic injustices, wholeheartedly drew her to the Creative Community Leaders project at the Union Chapel, which she recognised as a local institution dedicated to diverse programming and social action activities.
Nina Quach (Chair)
Nina Quach (chair) is Head of Programmes for the UCL Grand Challenges of Global Health and Human Wellbeing, supporting the development of cross-disciplinary collaborations and their translation into real-life impact. She is the lead organiser of the annual UCL-Lancet Lecture, a public event which addresses issues of global societal concern. She also edits and produces Disruptive Voices and Creative Lives, two UCL Minds podcasts. Prior to joining UCL, Nina worked as a Consultant Engagement Manager at Imperial College London. She has a background in Social Sciences and Environmental Sciences.
Latifah Al Said
Latifah Al Said: Born to parents from the East and the West, I have always been fascinated by cultural hybridity and how this has shaped my senses, and the lens through which I experience the world. Within my brush marks, my ancestors, doorways, windows, and symbolic boats are often highlighted, repeated, and reworked. In pursuit of a fleeting moment, I contextualise and reframe the presence and absence of family members and belongings, my hazy memories kept close and eternally captured on canvas. Partially revealed, I attempt to collapse my present reality and bring the past to life, forever layered in washes of paint, helping me work through subconscious emotions and fears. My complex cultural identity is mulled upon frequently, through depictions of the land, the body, water, and sea - a space of healing and trauma. I search for a lost time, imagining my ancestors walking or sailing alongside me on mysterious dhows, coffee pots metaphors for family. The work I am compelled to create, enables and empowers me to make sense of who I am, as my identity is contoured, labelled, shaped, and redrawn by myself and the world around me.
JD Carpentieri
JD Carpentieri is a Lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education and an Honorary Research Associate at UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies. In his research he has used a range of British cohort studies to investigate wellbeing and ageing. In particular, he has led a number of qualitative and mixed methods studies aimed at improving understanding of cohort members' experiences of and perspectives on middle age and later life. He is currently co-leading a six-cohort qualitative study of cohort members’ experiences of long-Covid – this project is part of the larger CONVALESCENCE study of long-Covid.
Carrie Ryan
Carrie Ryan is a Lecturer (Teaching) in Biosocial Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at UCL. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2019.
Before joining UCL, Carrie was a Tutor in Anthropology at University of Oxford and an Associate Lecturer in Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. She then worked as a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing on a project examining the intersection of ageing wellbeing, loneliness, and the arts. She has worked in nursing homes and retirement communities for over ten years.
Anne Laceley (Chair)
Anne Laceley (chair) is Associate Professor in Women’s Cancer, UCL EGA Institute for Women’s Health. With a background in English literature with nursing and health care, Anne is Head of the Women’s Cancer Research Department at UCL. Anne’s research focuses on examining the patient experience dimension of developments in the field of women’s cancers in the era of genomic medicine. Anne has a life-long interest in language and patient and health professional communication.
Rebecca Loweth
Rebecca Loweth works in arts and health and social prescribing, specialising in art workshops that encourage learning through making, predominantly in the medium of collage. Her art practice focuses on the concept of artifice and the aspirations of ideals, these ideas serve as the impetus to produce film, collage and sculpture. Often working with found postcards, Rebecca is interested in the idea of expectation, reality and artificiality of the holiday experience.
Ruth Siddall
Ruth Siddall: My experience started in student residences when I became Deputy Warden at Ifor Evans Hall. Being a hall warden enables one to see all aspects, good and bad, of student life. I very quickly became experienced in dealing with issues ranging from burst water pipes to major personal difficulties encountered by students. In 2007, I became UCL’s Dean of Students (Welfare) and this role has given me a lot of experience in helping students work through problems that they encounter during their studies. I feel committed to giving all students the optimum chance to graduate from UCL with a good degree whatever else life may throw at them. Mediation is a route for students who find themselves in a position of disagreement with other members of the UCL community, to resolve these conflicts in a mutually acceptable manner involving the least amount of stress.
Jo Volley (Chair)
Jo Volley (chair) is an artist who lives and works in London. She is Deputy Director (Projects), Director, Material Research Project and the Material Museum, at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her three most recent research projects include: The Pigment Timeline Project, From Pigments to Solar Power, Colour & Emotion Toolkit and writing an Art School Guide to Material Practice. In 2019 she intiated and directed Colour & Poetry: A Symposium to celebrate International Colour Day and World Poetry Day and in 2020 along with Dr Ruth Siddall established World Pigment Day. In 2019 she was artist in residence at MACRO Asilo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome sponsored by Lefranc Beourgois, ColArt and is currently working on an installation wall painting colour timeline for the Van Gogh House London.
Kiz Bangerh (biography above)
Rabya Mughal
Rabya Mughal is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Culture & Health Research Group. She is researching the impact of Covid restrictions on vulnerable and shielding individuals, with a focus on arts, nature, music, culture, and wellbeing. She has a PhD in psychology and human development from the UCL Institute of Education and a background in special education and service design.
Mah Rana
Mah Rana is a co-director of the LENs (Lived Experience Network), and an external adviser with lived experience on the Community Covid Project at UCL led by Prof Helen Chatterjee.
She is currently studying for a PhD in Psychology at Birkbeck College, exploring the lived experiences of participatory crafting within a context of domestic dementia-care.
She teaches at the Royal College of Art, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an ambassador for Dementia Carers Counts.
Dr Emily Bradfield
Dr Emily Bradfield is an Independent Arts Consultant who supports people to re:imagine evaluation & manage projects creatively. She is also Charity Director at Arts and Minds, an arts and mental health charity working across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. Emily holds a PhD in Creative Ageing (University of Derby) and an MSc in Cultural Events Management (De Montfort University). She is passionate about bridging the gap between research and practice, advocating arts for social change and weaving creativity throughout research, evaluation and practice. During her PhD research, Emily developed her own style of visual note taking, #CreativeCapture.
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