Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Hello, I’m Brianna Smith. I serve as the Program Manager at Performance Hypothesis—a small but mighty arts and health firm. At Performance Hypothesis, I manage and evaluate several arts and health programs. Thank you for navigating to my blog! I hope you find this a quick and uplifting read.
While intertwining the arts into health is not a new phenomenon, the formal field of arts in health is relatively young, emerging only a few decades ago. This fact underscores the need for arts and health evaluation: to understand the impact of these programs and to justify the importance of implementing arts and health initiatives to promote health and wellbeing.
In my role, I’ve had the pleasure of managing and evaluating incredible initiatives in collaboration with organizations such as the Georgia Department of Public Health, CDC Foundation, Emory University, and Creative Forces®: NEA Military Healing Arts Network Music Therapy Program. Through this work, I’ve seen firsthand just how powerful the arts can be in addressing and enhancing health and wellbeing. For example, a program that I managed and evaluated leveraged visual arts to share pertinent health information about COVID-19 and the vaccine which led to more than 700 vaccinations provided to Georgia community members.
Research also highlights that arts and health programs can:
Despite the multitude of benefits associated with arts and health programs and the need to understand these associations, this is a challenging time to be an arts and health evaluator. Critical fields that overlap with arts and health—such as research, diversity, equity, and inclusion—are being defunded and even demonized. This reality makes it especially important to engage in the arts for your own peace, joy, and health.
In closing, I’ll leave you with a few hot tips:
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Arts, Culture, and Museums (ACM) TIG Week. The contributions all week come from ACA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.