Josh Kun moderates a panel featuring The Pitt star and executive producer Noah Wyle, medical consultant Elizabeth Ferreira, executive producer Simran Baidwan and R. Scott Gemmill, showrunner and creator, from left to right. (USC Photo/Sean Dube)
Inaugural Arts + Health symposium highlights the power of art to heal, inspire and support well-being
USC scientists and artists — along with creative staff of The Pitt — shared groundbreaking interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of creativity and health care.
Actor Noah Wyle has been playing doctors on television for much of his more than three-decade career, most recently as Michael “Robby” Robinavitch in the Emmy Award-winning HBO Max emergency-room drama, The Pitt.
On Monday, at the first-ever Arts + Health: A USC Arts Now Symposium, Wyle spoke about how witnessing the show’s resonance with its millions of viewers has sharpened his understanding of how art shapes our views on health and health care providers.
“I think people are tuning in to be reminded that there are dedicated, intelligent, compassionate, complex people that are out there, day in and day out, putting our broken pieces together, compartmentalizing their own trauma to do so — and oftentimes don’t get any of the credit,” said Wyle, who also serves as a writer, director and executive producer on the series.
His commentary went to the heart of the half-day symposium’s theme: “the power of the arts as a tool for medical knowledge, for healing, for wellness,” said Josh Kun, USC vice provost for the arts and professor and chair in cross-cultural communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Kun co-organized the event — held at the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Hall on the USC University Park Campus and attended by more than 400 people — with Michele Kipke, USC associate senior vice president for strategic health initiatives at the office of the senior vice president for health affairs, and Shrikanth Narayanan, USC vice president for presidential initiatives and University Professor.
Through panel discussions, demonstrations, performances and a keynote conversation with Kun, Wyle and other special guests from The Pitt, the symposium drew attention to groundbreaking interdisciplinary arts-and-health collaborations within USC and with scientists and artists outside the university. Dance, music, painting, comedy, cinema, gaming and narrative were among the creative forms represented throughout the day’s talks, alongside medical fields including neurology, radiology, oncology and more.
With its six conservatory-level arts schools, five health schools and academic medical system, USC is a unique incubator for innovations in arts and healing. “USC is very ideally suited for promoting and advancing excellence across these domains,” Narayanan said.
Health meets Hollywood at USC Arts + Health symposium
Co-sponsored by USC’s arts and humanities initiative Visions and Voices, the symposium was presented by USC Arts Now, a presidential initiative led by Kun to foster projects and programming that put USC’s arts schools and resources into new, unexpected collaborations with each other and connect fields as disparate as health sciences, computing and the arts. Another aim is to link USC faculty and students to artists, arts industries and arts institutions in Los Angeles and around the world.
The Pitt is a prime example of an artistic work informed by USC expertise. Wyle and the other Pitt panelists explained how the show’s gritty realism is made possible in part by a collaboration between the show and Hollywood, Health and Society, a program of the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. Since 2001, the program has provided the entertainment industry with accurate and up-to-date information for storylines on health, safety and security. It connects The Pitt’s creative staff to specialized health professionals to help them gain an inside perspective on medical scenarios that inform storylines.
“Getting the perspective from The Pitt’s showrunner, actor, writer and medical consultant allowed us to see how they each approach the creation of one scene to be both medically accurate and narratively exciting,” said Tara Sandman-Long, a senior at the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy who attended the symposium. “It was as if I was watching an operation in real time as each individual panelist broke down their specific piece and how what they brought to the table made the show what it was.”
USC Arts + Health symposium: Dancing, singing, clowning around
Patrick Corbin, associate professor of practice at the USC Kaufman School of Dance, got the symposium audience on their feet for an impromptu dance during his morning presentation. Following his cues, participants stepped side to side, waved their hands in the air and spun in circles. Corbin’s instructions were drawn from dance classes he has taught alongside USC students to older adults with Parkinson’s disease, children with Down syndrome, people with autism, and other vulnerable communities.
“Dancing facilitates several things within our brains across all of these domains: sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, creative,” Corbin said. “When we’re dancing together, we share that reward and create connections with each other.”
Corbin’s series of adaptive dance classes is among a robust collection of USC programs that use the arts in creative and evidence-based ways to provide comfort and healing to patients and support health across the lifespan. Other programs represented at the symposium included the Institute for Arts in Medicine (I_AM) at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, which offers a wide range of expressive arts programming to improve clinical outcomes for cancer patients; USC Comic+Care, a program at the USC School of Dramatic Arts that employs medical clowns in hospitals to support children grappling with illness; USC Narrative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, where workshops have helped cancer patients engage in reflective writing and create community poems with healing themes; and the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center, a collaboration between the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Keck School of Medicine that has created virtual reality games for rehabilitating spinal cord injury patients and Parkinson’s disease patients.
Music-based programs discussed at the symposium included the Aging Minds Project at the Center for Music, Brain and Society at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, which assesses how participating in a choir and listening to music influences well-being in older adults; and the Cochlear Implant Music Hour presented by the Bionic Ear Lab at Keck School of Medicine, which helps cochlear implant users to rediscover music through weekly virtual sessions with guest musicians.
“Health and healing do not just happen in clinics and hospitals,” Kipke said. “They happen in communities, in relationships, in identity and in the way in which we make meaning of life.”
Telling stories, saving lives
Jeremy Kagan, professor at School of Cinematic Arts, and Sheila Murphy, professor at USC Annenberg, showed two short films at the symposium that shared identical facts about women’s gynecological health screenings. One was an informational documentary, the other a dramatic narrative of several generations of women in a family discussing their health while making tamales. Both films were made by Kagan and Murphy’s Change Making Media Center at School of Cinematic Arts, which uses filmmaking as a tool for promoting social, health and environmental change.
The symposium audience erupted in laughter at humorous, poignant moments in the tamale-making film, demonstrating its relatability. Prior research conducted at the center showed that female viewers learned equally from both films, but the narrative was more effective than the documentary in motivating viewers to make potentially lifesaving doctor’s appointments.
“By using good stories that entertain, you can potentially shift awareness and even change behavior,” Kagan said. “Facts inform, but stories transform.”
Few fields reveal medicine’s storytelling power more vividly than radiology, which produces “pretty pictures” that resemble art — all while exposing unseen truths about the body.
At the panel “Radiology Live,” Summer Decker — professor of clinical radiology at Keck School of Medicine and director of the school’s Center for Innovation in Medical Visualization — joined her associate director, Jonathan Ford, associate professor of clinical radiology, to share what CT scans uncovered about a 2,300-year-old Egyptian mummy: a life full of stories untold.
Visual artist Edgar Arceneaux, associate professor and chair of art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, rounded out the conversation, tracing parallels between the studio and the scan room. The trio explored how art sharpens medicine — improving surgical precision and deepening patient understanding — while medical imaging, in turn, gives artists new ways to grapple with mortality and meaning.
“It’s been really special for us to remember that this [mummy] was a person walking around on the earth; someone loved them and cared for them,” Decker said, noting how this understanding extends to all radiology patients. “Every day, as we’re looking at these images, we remind ourselves that these are people. We’re about to impact someone’s life. And we can tell their story.”
The transformational possibilities of creating and consuming art for individual health and collective well-being proved to be a unifying message for the day.
“The short, exciting presentations gave insights into specifically how narrative affects whether someone would go to the doctor and walked us through the power of dance to the mind,” Sandman-Long said. “I was able to learn specific knowledge that I could take with me, not just a general understanding that art and medicine can somehow be connected.”
