Why Creative Health
Health is more than what happens in a clinic.
It is shaped by the stories a society tells, the images it makes visible, the places where people live and gather, and whether individuals and communities feel seen, heard, valued, and safe. Culture influences how we understand illness and wellbeing, whose experiences are believed, and what solutions we can imagine.1
That is why creativity belongs at the center of health, not at its margins.
Creativity changes what we can see
Data can reveal inequity, but numbers alone rarely change how people understand one another. Art, storytelling, film, design, and cultural experience make complex realities visible and felt. They can surface knowledge that institutions overlook, challenge narratives that cause harm, and illuminate the strengths and possibilities already present in communities.
“Numbers and quantitative data are important for accountability and understanding need, but data is rarely used to understand the strengths in communities; only the deficits. The opportunity in filmmaking, arts, and culture is to tell stories that shape narratives and drive action at the individual, community, and collective level.”
When people can recognize themselves in the stories, images, and systems surrounding health, dignity, trust, and belonging become possible.
Culture shapes what becomes possible
The stories repeated through media, medicine, technology, and public life influence how people understand health, whose experiences they believe, and which conditions they consider changeable. These narratives do not move in only one direction. They emerge from culture and collective beliefs, shape public understanding and policy choices, and are reinforced, or disrupted, by the institutions and policies that follow.2,3
Changing harmful narratives therefore requires more than better messaging. It requires relationships across communities and disciplines: artists working with researchers, public health leaders building with cultural institutions, and storytellers collaborating with technologists, clinicians, and people with lived experience.
Creative health builds the spaces where those relationships can form, established assumptions can be questioned, and new possibilities can emerge.
Creative health works across levels
Creative health operates across interconnected levels. Artistic and cultural experiences can affect emotion, cognition, physiology, behavior, identity, and meaning at the individual level; strengthen belonging, relationships, and collective capacity at the community level; and influence the narratives, norms, institutions, and policies that shape health at the societal level.4
Culture is therefore not simply a tool for communicating health information. It is one of the contexts through which health is understood, experienced, and created.1
The evidence is growing
A World Health Organization review drawing on more than 3,000 studies found a significant role for the arts in preventing illness, promoting health, and supporting the management and treatment of health conditions across the lifespan.5
An evidence-based public-health framework subsequently identified six broad ways arts and culture can advance health and 59 specific outcomes that may be addressed through cultural strategies.6 Research also suggests that arts engagement can support wellbeing and social inclusion, address collective trauma and racism, and influence the social and structural conditions that produce health inequities.7
This is not decoration added after the serious work is complete. It is part of the serious work.
We artivize health
The House of novellaWells for Creative Health brings together art, activation, and visualization to expand what creates health.
Through storytelling, immersive experiences, cultural programs, convenings, and community-authored work, we turn evidence into experience and imagination into action. We create opportunities for people to encounter health differently-not only as the absence of illness, but as dignity, visibility, belonging, creativity, wealth, connection, and collective possibility.
Because when we change what people can see, feel, and imagine, we change what they are prepared to build.
References
- Napier, A. D., Depledge, M., Knipper, M., Lovell, R., Ponarin, E., Sanabria, E., & Thomas, F. (2017). Culture Matters: Using a Cultural Contexts of Health Approach to Enhance Policy-Making. World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.
- Jones, M. D., & McBeth, M. K. (2010). “A Narrative Policy Framework: Clear Enough to Be Wrong?” Policy Studies Journal, 38(2), 329–353.
- Schneider, A., & Ingram, H. (1993). “Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy.” American Political Science Review, 87(2), 334–347.
- Fancourt, D., Aughterson, H., Finn, S., Walker, E., & Steptoe, A. (2021). “How Leisure Activities Affect Health: A Narrative Review and Multi-Level Theoretical Framework of Mechanisms of Action.” The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(4), 329–339.
- Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What Is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-Being? A Scoping Review. World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.
- Golden, T. L., Sonke, J., & Rodriguez, A. K. (2025). “An Evidence-Based Framework for the Use of Arts and Culture in Public Health.” Health Promotion Practice, 26(3), 454–462.
- Rodriguez, A. K., Akram, S., Colverson, A. J., Hack, G., Golden, T. L., & Sonke, J. (2024). “Arts Engagement as a Health Behavior: An Opportunity to Address Mental Health Inequities.” Community Health Equity Research & Policy, 44(3), 315–322.