University of Florida

Sophia Kryzys Accord is the Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives in the UF College of the Arts. Before beginning her tenure in July 2021, she was the Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere.

A cultural sociologist by training, Sophia joined the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere team in 2010. For 11 years, she oversaw the Humanities Center’s daily operations, as well as its internal funding programs, annual speaker series, humanities fellowship- and grant-seeking support, and the Mellon Intersections project. Sophia co-founded the UF Digital Humanities Working Group, Imagining America Working Group, Impact of Materials on Society course project, and Humanities and the Sunshine State Summer Programs for high school students and educators, and she generally encourages scholars to cross academic boundaries for fruitful conversations!

Prior to UF, Sophia was a specialist researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education,  where she managed the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project.  She has also held research fellowships at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology and the École des Mines Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, and was a founding editor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Music and Arts in Action. Her research examines the collaborative production of knowledge in the arts and humanities, and she has published work in cultural sociology, the sociology of the arts, higher education, mobile technologies, museum studies, and qualitative research methods.

Sophia holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Exeter (from which her dissertation on curating contemporary art received an Honorable Mention for the 2010 American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award), an M.Res. from the University of Exeter, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.

Jill Sonke is director of the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF), and 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 UF School of Theatre & Dance, the Center for African Studies, the STEM Translational Communication Center, the One Health Center, and the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases. Jill 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.

Dr. Sonke studied dance at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Florida State University, in London, Paris and Athens with teachers of the Horton and Duncan techniques including Bella Lewitsky, Lynda Davis, Milton Meyers, Joy Kellman, Lori Belilove, Julia Levine and Hortense Koluris. She has been a principle dancer and soloist with Lori Belilove & the Isadora Duncan Dance Company in New York and a guest performer and choreographer with Dance Alive! and Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theatre.

With 27+ years of experience and leadership in arts in health, Dr. Sonke is active in research, teaching, and international cultural exchange. Her current research focuses on the arts and health communication, the arts in public health, and the effects of music on cost and quality of care in emergency medicine. She is the recipient of a New Forms Florida Fellowship Award, a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, a UF Internationalizing the Curriculum Award, a UF Most Outstanding Service Learning Faculty Award, a UF Public Health Champions award, a UF Cross-Campus Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and over 300 grants for her programs and research at the University of Florida.