The Art of Healthy Communities

In the summer of 2020, racial and social tensions were high. On top of the national anxiety surrounding COVID-19, it also marked a year of unrest following the murder of George Floyd. Following that tumultuous summer, Emory University established the Arts & Social Justice Fellows Program. The initiative pairs Emory faculty with Atlanta-based artists to incorporate creative elements into various courses to inspire students to reflect on social inequities and promote change. Elizabeth Walker, PhD, teaching associate professor of behavioral, social, and health education sciences, participated in the inaugural cohort in fall 2020.

“Everything happening in the world at that time had a big impact on mental health, both broadly and for students,” says Walker. “I wanted to do the fellowship to use art to think through these difficult topics through a public health lens. It provided a way to help students create community and get them through this difficult time as well.”

Walker was paired with Okorie Johnson, a local cellist and composer, to teach the course, Prevention of Mental and Behavioral Disorders. In this course, students learned about the risks and protective factors that influence mental disorders and explored how art can be used to change the narrative about mental health, build community, and bolster resilience. As a culminating project for the class, Johnson helped students write a poem based on class discussions about mental health and social justice. He then set it to music he composed and created a stirring video featuring students from the course.

By being vulnerable and creative together, students were able to build community, feel comfortable sharing their stories, and process difficult events.

“Stories and lived experiences are really powerful and important for the work that we do in public health,” says Walker. “And art is just another way to be able to powerfully share people's stories.”

For 10 years, Briana Woods-Jaeger, PhD, associate professor of behavioral, social, and health education sciences, has worked with colleagues and community partners on Youth Empowered Advocating for Health (YEAH), a program designed for youth to promote social action in their communities. A central component of the program is “photovoice,” a research approach in which community members use photography to describe their experiences, stories, and ideas for change.

“By implementing YEAH, we learned that the process of storytelling and using the arts to promote social change and community action are really powerful and something youth wanted to see more of,” says Woods-Jaeger. In response, she and her colleagues partnered with Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre to bring theater arts and storytelling into the YEAH curriculum and expand the program to more communities. 

This expanded program will begin in fall 2024 at six Boys & Girls Clubs of America across metro Atlanta in communities experiencing high rates of structural violence (when social structures or institutions harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs). Over the next three years, youth from 12 Boys & Girls Clubs will participate in the eight-week intervention.

In the first half of the program youth use photography to document community issues they are concerned about as well as strengths. Facilitators—including Alliance Theatre teaching artists, Boys & Girls Club staff, and Emory University students—then lead discussions about the photos, identify priorities, and help youth craft a theater performance that tells their stories. Through youths’ participation in this creative process, and engaging the wider community in watching their performances, Woods-Jaeger and her team hope to see positive changes in civic engagement, racial identity, and community violence prevention.

“Addressing the issues we’re focused on requires multilevel approaches that promote individual healing and collective healing,” says Woods-Jaeger. “The arts are uniquely positioned to allow us to do that and to build on community strengths. I believe that solutions exist within communities and that the arts can help us tap into that potential and translate it into community-level impact.”

Watch the video below to see how youth who participated in YEAH translated their photovoice themes into a short film to raise awareness of Kansas City's Black history.

Using visual imagery to promote understanding of public health issues is something that Julie Gazmararian, PhD, professor of epidemiology, has become very familiar with throughout the course of her career.

“I've done a lot of work around health literacy, and there's been so much research demonstrating that pictures make more of an impact than looking at numbers and data tables,” she says. “When you're dealing with different audiences, art is a common denominator and another way to communicate effectively.”

It is no surprise then that in 2019, Gazmararian jumped at the opportunity to participate in Science.Art.Wonder. The Atlanta-wide initiative, led by Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, pairs scientists with artists to produce creative works that communicate scientific research in accessible ways. She had recently finished a study of the relationship between sleep and academic performance in historically marginalized populations and was interested in using art to increase awareness of the topic. She was paired with artist David Denton, a Rollins student (now an alumnus) and painter.

After meetings with Gazmararian to gain understanding about her research and share ideas, Denton produced three paintings about chronic sleep loss in Black adolescents. All three paintings feature his nephew as the subject.

“I was blown away by his work,” says Gazmararian. “There was just so much emotion in his paintings.”

Although the work was originally slated to be exhibited at the Atlanta Science Festival in March 2020, the event was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Denton’s paintings, along with others from the fall 2019 class of Science.Art.Wonder, were displayed on Emory’s campus later that year.

Anna Mullany, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in behavioral, social, and health education sciences, has long been interested in using art for activism and health promotion. She often uses street theater as a tool to educate others and advocate for social justice.

“There’s a long history of street theater being connected to activism and social issues, and there are a lot of examples of it being used in public health,” says Mullany. “I also understand public health as a political issue, embedded with health inequities and reflecting the serious societal issues that we face.”

When she taught public health communication to undergraduate students during her PhD program at University of Massachusetts Amherst, she knew she had to incorporate street theater into the class. She continued teaching street theater as a public health tool as a visiting professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where students in her health activism course wrote and performed skits on campus as their culminating project. During the course, students worked to understand the relationship between activism and public health and chose health issues that were important to them as the focal point of their skits. She recently shared her insights on theater as a learning tool in an article published in Pedagogy in Health Promotion.

For Mullany, street theater serves as an accessible and approachable health activism tool. The short length of skits and the visual impact of props make it an effective way to reach audiences from diverse backgrounds. Street theater can also shed light on hidden and stigmatized issues such as mental health and harm reduction.

“A lot of these issues are invisible to people who often can’t or don't want to see them,” she says. “By making them visible out on the street, you're interrupting that person's day to say, ‘This is important, you need to see what's happening.’ It’s a way to draw people in.”

Story by Shelby Crosier
Designed by Linda Dobson
Illustration by Anna Godeassi
Portrait Photography by Theo Gayle, Bita Honarvar, and Audra Melton