Intersection of Art and Health
How can the arts transform the way we think about health care? That’s what Dr. Caro Novella, ETSU's spring 2024 Basler Chair of Excellence, seeks to answer with over 20 years of extensive research and teaching.
Novella is an independent scholar who focuses on research at the crossroads of art, communication, and medicine. Novella has lectured at Stanford University, the University of California-Davis, and various museums nationally and abroad. Most recently, Novella taught ETSU theater classes “Performing Arts and Medicalized Bodies” and “Devising Arts in Health” alongside lectures and performances throughout the spring semester.
In childhood, Novella dreamed of becoming a doctor but disliked some of the nitty-gritty details of the profession. Novella began studying music, theater, and communications and realized that there was a vital connection between the arts and medicine. That’s when Novella began working in nonprofit and health communication positions, and now has over 20 years of experience in the field.
Novella was passionate about this work from the start, but the mission became a lot clearer when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011.
“Since then, I have fully committed even more to the possibility of transforming the pains of health that sometimes come in a doctor-patient relationship,” said Novella. “Sometimes the pain comes from the experience of the illness and how it is portrayed in the media.”
In response, Novella has built projects like "oncogrrrls,” a series of creative processes that enable intersectional conversations about cancer through the lens of gender, race, research, and corporate effects; and Co-Sense Lab, which features research around the cycles of life and death.
Many of Novella’s projects utilize scores, which are essentially a set of instructions to guide activities that involve the whole body and senses. Novella has been teaching students how to devise scores for engaging conversations around health.
For example, one of Novella’s students created a public activity involving the inflation of balloons to simulate lung capacity. Participants were tasked with trying to keep a number of balloons in the air without letting them touch the floor. After this activity, the group would discuss what they observed. They might talk about how the activity simulated the difficulty for nurses to keep everyone afloat or what it’s like for some people with smaller lung capacity.
“We started talking about the importance of collaboration in the medical field just through playing with balloons,” shared Novella.
Novella hopes to continue working at this specific intersection of the arts and health, focusing on how the arts can help medical professionals practice more humanely.
By Ember Brummitt | Photo by Larry Smith
Read more incredible stories in the Summer 2024 Edition of ETSU Today. #BucsGoBeyond
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