Date: Saturday, October 11, 2025
Hi there! My name is Cassie Belden, MA, and I am an Evaluation & Research Specialist at University of Florida, Health Shands, Arts in Medicine in Gainesville, Florida. With Arts in Medicine at Shands Hospital, our comprehensive team of 18 paid artists work to transform the hospital experience for patients, visitors, caregivers, and staff while providing health and wellness through the arts within the community.
Funny enough, being a visual artist is what brought me to my work in evaluation and research. Spending a decade creating art with people in museums, community spaces, school systems and clinical environments, I witnessed how catalyzing the arts are for deep connection making, resiliency, wellbeing and so much more. My artist and caretaking lens are what uniquely suit me for my work at the intersection of arts in health.
Follow your spark: A fierce spark to chase the arts at all costs is how I found myself here from Buffalo, NY. A visual artist first and foremost is how I entered work in the field of arts in health, creating artwork hands-on and dreaming up projects alongside anyone from pre-k to hospice. In my late teens, recognizing the arts as a key to humanity was made tangible through lived experience. Fast-forward a decade, I chased knowledge to understand how I could be a key advocate in keeping the arts in places I felt humanity needed it most, in community and spaces of care. The world of evaluation and research felt beyond me, a new skill, a challenge; the unknown.
Balance Head and Heart in Your Work: Being an artist facilitator for so many years, I knew that there were incredibly heartfelt experiences happening with the way the arts were affecting people’s wellbeing, their connection to themselves and others, levels of confidence, perceived ability and beyond. I had a deep-rooted need to capture that in a way it could be safely documented for others to see, and to validate the arts in places they are oftentimes hard to sustain.
My responsibility as an evaluator and researcher is to carefully balance head and heart, or what I know to be quantitative and qualitative. The numbers mean nothing without stories, and stories can be strengthened by numbers. I speak to wide audiences about the arts with the advantage of knowing the work from the inside out. This allows me to dive deep into people’s experiences, uplift their stories, and leverage those transformative moments into strong advocacy.
Let Your Values Guide Your Process: In my heart, I know what brings me joy is to make people feel safe, peaceful and comfortable. Those values translate seamlessly when going through detail-oriented tasks like IRB (Institutional Review Board) and thorough consent form creation, ensuring all steps are being taken to protect others.
Embrace Your Creative Nature in Research: My exploratory side as an artist translates into reading up on research, testing frameworks, re-imagining methodology, and combining new ways of using tools and frameworks that resemble my curious nature to limitlessly create.
My aesthetic eye to create something that speaks to others shines in my work as an artist, just as it might when creating something like an impact report.
Trust That Your Background Translates: Being an artist is what made being an evaluation and research specialist feel like second nature. When your values are true to yourself and a mission, they translate to so many aspects of life and learning, even places unknown.
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