Humanizing Healthcare Through the Arts: Sarah Wilbur Leads a Conversation on Creative Care
Sarah Wilbur, associate professor of the practice in Dance and Theater Studies, with a secondary appointment in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. (Photo courtesy of Amy Stern)
At a moment when healthcare systems are confronting clinician burnout, persistent inequities, and profound disconnection, a new fall 2026 conversation series, Humanizing Healthcare Through the Arts, ask a generative question: What if creativity was seen not as an extra, but as an essential part of care? How might artists’ participation in health and care collaborations cultivate responsiveness within a historically and structurally beleaguered U.S. healthcare industry?
Hosted at the Rubenstein Arts Center’s Ruby Lounge, the free public series will bring healthcare professionals, artists, students, researchers and Durham community members into conversation with national leaders whose work is reshaping how the arts can support healing, wellbeing and connection across contexts.
Across three 90-minute gatherings in September, October and November, participants will explore ideas with real-world consequences: arts referrals as reimbursable resources integrated into health systems, creative approaches to dementia and long term elder care, research on the neurological and social benefits of artistic engagement, and culturally grounded development of a creative care workforce.
The series is led and moderated by Dr. Sarah Wilbur, associate professor of the practice in Dance and Theater Studies at Duke with a secondary appointment in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. A dance-and-health practitioner, arts labor researcher and community-engaged artist, Wilbur has built her career navigating the intersection of creative practice, arts organizational models and the economic and institutional systems that shape both. She contributes book-length accounts of how patterns of federal arts funding and investments by the U.S. health industry shape artists’ work and wellbeing, and has spent the past 25 years designing and implementing dance programs in clinical and community-based care spaces. She leads a Bass Connections Team for 2026-2027 that is expanding arts programming into a range of care contexts in collaboration with el Centro Hispano, White Rock Baptist Church, the Durham VA Medical Center, Aging Well Durham, Dementia Inclusive, Inc., and Durham Center for Senior Life.
For Wilbur, the series is an opportunity to make the conversation around arts and health at Duke and in Durham more visible — and more actionable. Rather than treating the arts as a “mechanism” or supplement to clinical care, Humanizing Healthcare Through the Arts will examine how creative engagement can be embedded in the policies, programs, training, and relationships that make care possible with an eye for infrastructural reform. The goal is to connect the people already doing this work across Duke and Durham with practical models and partners from beyond the region.
The opening conversation on September 23 features Chris Appleton, founder and CEO of SocialRx and its arts-prescription platform Art Pharmacy, alongside MacArthur Fellow Dr. Anne Basting, whose TimeSlips Creative Storytelling has transformed dementia and elder care around the world.
On October 21, Andrea Camp and Dr. Emmeline Edwards of the NeuroArts Blueprint will discuss emerging research that links artistic engagement to individual and community wellbeing.
The series culminates on November 4 with Dr. Meida McNeal and Leyda “Lady Sol” Garcia, who will discuss creative care workforce development initiatives unfolding in Chicago on a number of fronts.
Each event will reserve time for discussion, relationship-building and collaboration. That structure reflects Wilbur’s larger vision: A durable local network where artists, clinicians, educators and community partners can learn from one another, develop pilot projects and build more humane systems of care.
With additional workshops and student mentorship opportunities, the series offers more than a chance to hear from national experts. It creates a shared space to imagine — and begin practicing — a future in which care makes room for movement, story, culture and the full complexity of human experience.