Featured Presenters
Christopher Bailey
Christopher Bailey is the Arts and Health Lead at the World Health Organization, a program focusing on the research agenda of the healing abilities of the arts, identifying effective community level arts-based health interventions, and partnering with global media to positively impact the largest possible audiences with arts-based healing. Educated at Columbia and Oxford Universities and trained in theatre at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bailey was not only a professional actor, playwright and director for many years, but also helped foster the discipline of Knowledge Management, first at the Rockefeller Foundation, and then at the World Health Organization. Rather than see arts and health in opposition, he prefers to think about it as a “left and right brain reunion.”
Todd Frazier
Todd Frazier is a composer and director of Houston Methodist Hospital System’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM). The Mission of CPAM is to effectively translate the collaborative potential of arts and medicine to the holistic healthcare environment of Houston Methodist. Under his directorship, the Center received the 2021 Texas Medal of the Arts Award from the Texas Cultural Trust; the 2019 International Hamilton Award from the National Organization for Arts in Health; and the 2017 Business Council for the Arts Award from Americans for the Arts.
He has worked to broaden professional opportunities and the scope of education for artists and expand the role and integrated value of the arts in communities and has spent nearly 30 years supporting research, education and accessibility collaborations between education, medicine, and arts and cultural communities in America. He is past president of the National Organization for Arts in Health, founder of American Festival for the Arts and Houston Arts Partners, and in 2016 was awarded the Luminary Award from the Eastman School of Music, which recognizes “individuals who have given extraordinary service to music and the arts at the community and national levels.”
Lisa Harris
Lisa E. Harris (Li) is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer, composer, improvisor, writer, researcher, and cultural producer from Houston. Recognized by Huffington Post as “one of fourteen artists transforming Opera,” Li's work resists genre classification as she focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit, and place. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, a North American based socially engaged arts collective and production company. Her work, “Cry of the Third Eye, a new opera film in Three Acts,” archives the effects of gentrification on her Houston neighborhood. Li is the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/ Sound, from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a 2021 Texas Vignette Artist Grant winner.
Rick Lowe
Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and professor of art at the University of Houston. He has exhibited and worked with communities nationally and internationally. His work has appeared in: the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Phoenix Art Museum; Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, Korea; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece. He is best known for his Project Row Houses community-based art project that he started in Houston in 1993. Additional community projects include the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, Anyang Public Art Program 2010 in Anyang, Korea, Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow in Dallas, TX, and Victoria Square Project in Athens, Greece. Among Lowe's honors are the Rudy Bruner Awards in Urban Excellence, the AIA Keystone Award, the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities, and MacArthur Fellow. He is currently represented by Gagosian Gallery.
Marcy Melvin
Marcy Melvin is a pivotal executive with over 25 years of experience in behavioral health policy, training, and clinical practice. As a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas her experience includes providing direct clinical and supervisory services to children, youth, parents, and young adults in various clinical settings including residential, in-home, outpatient, private practice, primary, secondary, and post-secondary locations. Marcy is extremely passionate about advancing health equity and reducing disparities and disproportionality this has been a culmination of her life’s work in various clinical, organizational and systems settings. Marcy Melvin has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana and a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology from Fisk University.
Kirsten Ostherr
Kirsten Ostherr, Ph.D., M.P.H., is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English, and director of the Medical Humanities program at Rice University in Houston, where she is a media scholar, health researcher, and technology analyst. She is founder of the Medical Humanities program (2016-present) and the Medical Futures Lab (2012-present).
She has extensive experience using human-centered design for patient collaboration in health technology development. Her research on trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems has been featured in “Marketplace Tech” on NPR, The Atlantic, STAT, Slate, The Washington Post, Big Data & Society, Catalyst, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Her writing about the COVID-19 pandemic has been featured in The Washington Post, STAT, Inside Higher Ed, and American Literature. Ostherr is the author of “Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies” (Oxford, 2013) and “Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health” (Duke, 2005). She is currently writing a book called “Robot Pathographies: Datafication, Surveillance, and Patient Stories in the Age of Virtual Health.”
Ostherr also leads a digital health humanities project called “Translational Humanities for Public Health” that identifies humanities-based pandemic responses from around the world to document and help others build upon these creative efforts, and her work was recently profiled in The Lancet.
Aisha Siddiqui
Aisha Siddiqui earned her doctorate from The University of Texas, School of Public Health (UTSPH) in Management, Policy, and Community Health Practice. Born and raised in Pakistan, Siddiqui moved to the United States with her husband in 1985. She has worked as an epidemiologist at the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, which strengthened her determination to serve the disadvantaged. While working on her doctoral degree, she sought out South Asian women to better understand the challenges they faced in staying healthy. In 2015, Siddiqui founded Culture of Health – Advancing Together (CHAT), a non-profit that fosters the health and wellbeing of immigrant and refugee communities through education, arts, advocacy, and access to care.