UGA Willson Center Hosts “Art, the Pandemic, and Public Health” Panel
November 30, 2021
As part of the University of Georgia’s 2021 Spotlight on the Arts festival, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts hosted “Art, the Pandemic, and Public Health,” a conversation between Jill Sonke, director of the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida; Maryrose Flanigan, executive director of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru); and Nicholas Allen, Professor in Humanities and director of the Willson Center.
Sonke is currently serving as Senior Advisor to the CDC Vaccine Confidence and Demand Team on the COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Task Force. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the University of Florida School of Theatre & Dance, the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, the Center for African Studies, the STEM Translational Communication Center, and the One Health Center. Sonke serves on the editorial board for Arts & Health journal and as a consulting editor for Health Promotion Practice journal. She is also director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at UF, and the national initiative Creating Health Communities: Arts + Public Health in America.
Maryrose Flanigan is the executive director of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), where she oversees a network of universities which are committed to advancing arts-based and interdisciplinary research, practice, and teaching in higher education. She serves on a presidential advisory group for the arts initiative at a2ru’s headquarters at the University of Michigan and is part of the advisory cohort for the Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative: Shifting Institutional Culture to Fortify Public Scholarship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This event is part of the University of Georgia’s Spotlight on the Arts festival. More information on the 2021 Spotlight on the Arts festival, including a schedule of events, can be found at arts.uga.edu.