Rick Maher

How Artists Work, Now

The Dance Program hosted two public conversations on art and healthcare, November 8 & 9, 2022.

The first panel discussed dance, health and the military, spotlighting the collaborative complexities at play in building participatory arts programs in US and Australian military mental health contexts.

Rick Maher served in the Australian Army for more than three decades and is also an enthusiastic, yet ungainly, ballet danseur. Up until a few years ago Rick’s regular soldiery gig included standing around looking cool as a Combat Aviation Officer. During this time, Rick served in a number of roles that included Regimental Command, operational deployments to East Timor, overseas service to both Singapore and Israel, and a Service-related internship to the Australian Senate. In 2019, whilst otherwise minding his own business, his career made an unexpected turn, and in what Rick describes as a cosmic level act of kismet, Rick’s two worlds of the military, and of dance, collided and he commenced his PhD research at the Queensland University of Technology with a focus on designing dance-based quality-of-life enhancements for war veterans with trauma based mental health injuries