The European Graduate School (EGS) is joining a new global academic network working to make the arts a core part of how we treat illness, promote wellness, and shape healthier communities.
Saas Fee, Switzerland, Sept. 30, 2025—The NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative today announced the launch of the Neuroarts Academic Network (NAN), which includes a representative from EGS. The NAN aims to expand the transformative power of the arts—such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling—by building the emerging interdisciplinary field of neuroarts and training the next generation of leaders.
Building on research that demonstrates how art positively affects the brain and body, Neuroarts explores how creative expression can be embedded in mainstream medicine, public health, and across society to improve health and well-being for all.
The NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative is led by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics and the Aspen Institute’s Health, Medicine & Society Program, with funding from The Music Man Foundation.
The NAN, led by the Neuroarts Academic Network Working Group, which includes The European Graduate School , will:
Connect universities and programs already working in neuroarts,
Encourage new research and training programs,
Build career paths that combine arts and health,
Expand best practices and address core challenges, and
Support the field so it grows in a sustainable and rigorous way.
The NAN Working Group members, who will inform the Network’s projects and long- term goals, represent over 35 public and private universities and institutions from around the globe including Berklee College of Music, ETH-Zurich, University of California at San Francisco, Morehouse School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Stanford University, University of Memphis, University of Pennsylvania, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
“Neuroarts is a vibrant, interdisciplinary field grounded in arts-evidence based knowledge and united by shared research principles, practices, and values. To fully realize its potential, we must learn from one another, develop a common language, and build a collaborative framework that enables our disciplines to flourish individually while also working together to build the field,” said Susan Magsamen, co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative and executive director of the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics.
The Network’s goal is to make neuroarts an established academic and professional field across disciplines including the arts, health, basic sciences, public health, architecture, design, education, business, community development, and more. Each discipline has a distinct career path and its own unique focus, but all are rooted in science showing the positive impact of the arts on health and well-being.
“With today’s announcement, we’re looking at a major paradigm shift. The new Neuroarts Academic Network will unite the people who are training the neuroarts workforce of tomorrow. Together we can bring the transformative power of the arts into every corner of society,” said Sarah Lyding, president of The Music Man Foundation, a national foundation dedicated to permanently changing the way the arts are used to improve education, health, and community well-being.
Since its founding, the Arts, Health and Society Division at EGS emerged from a desire to create a rigorous yet alternative educational space, grounded in intellectual depth, imaginative freedom, and embodied humanness. The founding vision of the school as an academic institution, articulated in the founding manifest, remains strikingly relevant: to foster both analytical and intuitive understanding, to promote innovative pedagogical approaches, and to address and engage with real-world challenges through a practice- oriented and creative lens.
Looking to the future, EGS hopes to continue shaping a networked future through education, research, and the arts in dialogue – to carry on facilitating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and teaching, in which knowledge is gained through both rational and scientific, as well as intuitive and artistic, means. EGS’ vision continues to embrace the spirit of artistic inquiry—bold, surprising, and pushing the limits of research boundaries—while seeking to broaden the dialogue with other disciplines, theoretical frameworks, and evidence-based approaches.
“I first came across the Neuroarts community locally in my city where they are working to bring artists, researchers, scientists, community health, and those of us working in the creative therapies field together. As I listened to some of their ideas, I thought that this community should also be in conversation with EGS and learn more about how we are working through the intermodal expressive arts and the ways in which it forms our
approach to community building, health and wellbeing. My hope would be to simply act as a bridge and connector for the depth of experience within the EGS faculty and help to bring additional aesthetic into the conversation.” – Shabrae Jackson, EGS faculty member and co-coordinator of the Expressive Arts and Global Health Program in Malta.
Thus, as an academic institution, EGS strives to play an important and innovative role in the European and international higher education sphere. Our vision remains a world in which interdisciplinary and creative educational approaches sustainably solve real social, cultural, and ecological challenges. In this sense, we understand the AHS Division as a space for thought and creativity, where science, art, and practice converge in an open, free, and responsible discourse—for the benefit of a growing global community.
“In these challenging times of rapid change, the Neuroarts Academic Network offers a bold, collaborative model to strengthen neuroarts education, workforce development, and interdisciplinary impact,” said Ruth J. Katz, co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative and executive director of the Health, Medicine & Society Program at the Aspen Institute. “It is essential to advancing this important and game-changing work.”
About the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative
The NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative is a partnership between the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab) Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics and the Aspen Institute’s Health, Medicine & Society (HMS) Program. Co-directed by Susan Magsamen, MAS, executive director of IAM Lab, and Ruth J. Katz, JD, MPH, executive director of the HMS Program, the Initiative bridges the gap between the arts and
sciences to advance health and well-being by promoting innovative research, developing evidence-based practices, and raising public awareness of the arts’ potential to enhance health.
About The Music Man Foundation
The Music Man Foundation is named after the Tony-winning musical written by Meredith Willson. Meredith’s widow, Rosemary, started the Foundation in 1998 as the Meredith and Rosemary Willson Charitable Foundation and substantially increased the Foundation’s endowment upon her death in 2010. The Foundation’s mission is to empower organizations using music to catalyze enduring change and to amplify our founders’ musical legacy. Over the last decade, the Foundation has awarded more than $25 million to 85 organizations. In addition to “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson wrote the musical, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and beloved songs “It’s Beginning to Look Like Christmas” and the University of Iowa fight song.