YOUR BRAIN ON ART: How the Arts Transform Us

Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross

Susan Magsamen is the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is a faculty member. Susan is also the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint with the Aspen Institute.  She works with both the public and private sectors using arts and culture evidence-based approaches in areas including health, child development, workforce innovation, rehabilitation, and social equity.

Ivy Ross is the Vice President for Hardware Design at Google, where she leads a team that has won over 240 design awards. She is a National Endowment for Arts grant recipient and was ninth on Fast Company’s list of the 100 most creative people in business in 2019. Ivy believes the intersection of arts and sciences is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found.

artsandmindlab.org/people

@susanmagsamen

Suchi Reddy

Born and raised in Chennai, Suchi Reddy immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. Her early affinity for art, architecture, and culture was fostered by her lawyer/philosopher father who was the first to be educated in his family, and her mother who, despite never attending school, taught herself seven languages. Reddy began studying architecture in India and continued her studies upon her arrival in the U.S. via Detroit. Traveling the country, living and working in eight states, Reddy developed a keen sense of the similarities and differences that bind communities together and began exploring them through her artistic practice with the liminal perspective of an immigrant. In 2002, she founded her New York-based firm, Reddy made with a focus on the emerging field of “neuroaesthetics.” Her mantra is the idea that “form follows feeling,” and it guides her work in the way in which it generates wonder and engagement in the communities it serves. Reddy’s artistic practice takes root in her architectural training with its expression as public sculpture and experiential work. She tackles issues of societal engagement using art and experience to create discourse around subjects with both local and global relevance. Her work always engages material innovation and interactive technologies in the service of expressing ideas around the power of community. Her spatial and experience-oriented approach to art has garnered acclaim for her installations which are designed to generate a ripple effect that continues past the life of the work in its first iteration.

reddymade.design

@reddymadedesign

Laura Inserra

Laura Inserra is a sound alchemist, a teacher, a technician of the sacred, and a multimedia producer. She lives and creates at the confluence of music, wisdom schools, and cutting-edge technology. Both a self-taught and classically trained musician, her career has many facets — multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound healer, teacher, artistic director, and producer. She grew up on the volcanic island of Sicily and has been exploring the ‘invisible world' of sound since her youngest years. A world-renowned Hang musician and teacher, Laura plays a large variety of unique ancient and modern instruments from around the world. Laura uses technology to augment the natural sources of her acoustic instruments creating her own library of soundscapes and sonic fields. Her productions create immersive sonic environments with a vast spectrum of frequencies that facilitate meta-sensory experiences, deep transformations, and well-being. She composes in various musical languages and performs in many different settings — from intimate spaces to large venues seating thousands. Her work is known as MetaMusic. Meta means beyond, transcendent. In this context, music becomes experiential, functional, and a metaphor for life. For decades she has been focusing her research on the transformative and healing power of sound. Combining her intimate knowledge of music with her studies of ancient schools of wisdom, she developed a practice called MetaMusic Healing, a new holistic approach to personal development, spiritual guidance, and well-being. In-person and online, she uses this method in one-on-one sessions as well as in teamwork, private gatherings, and site-specific installations. Laura is the co-founder of Seeds of Gold Institute, whose mission is to research and integrate ancient technology and schools of wisdom into modern life. The institute is dedicated to helping individuals, groups, and the Earth community in the journey of personal growth and collective evolution.

laurainserra.com

@laura_inserra

Judy Tuwaletstiwa

Judy Tuwaletstiwa is a visual artist, writer and teacher. Her work resides in private and museum collections nationally and internationally. After earning degrees in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, she discovered the power of visual art to connect us to the deepest part of ourselves. She has spent her life exploring and expressing this, using different media. As a teacher, she helps people explore their unique creative vision. She writes:

 Art has taught me that walls and doorways are the same thing.

Art has taught me that an image can be a transformative gift of healing.

Art has taught me that what we see is only a fraction of what is there.

Art has taught me that the longer I make art, the greater the mystery.

judytuwaletstiwa.com

@tuwaletstiwa

Li Edelkoort

Co-Founder World Hope Forum

One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.

@lidewijedelkoort 

Philip Fimmano

Co-Founder World Hope Forum

A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting masters at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.

@philipfimmano