Date: Sunday, September 27, 2026
Jenica serves as the lead for the Health Evaluation Topical Interest Group (TIG) for the American Evaluation Association (AEA). Marcel Foster, MPH, is the co-founder and CEO of Performance Hypothesis and serves as the Chair for the Arts, Culture, and Museum TIG for AEA. We believe that AEA is at its strongest when our various groups learn across boundaries.
As we begin and continue to investigate the enormous interconnections between arts and health, we have found that evaluation practice becomes most robust when we bridge the gap between traditional health rigor and arts-based meaning-making. While health evaluation often focuses on effectiveness, implementation, and population impact, the arts and culture sector brings deep expertise in participation, context, and culturally grounded experience. This collaboration is vital because health does not happen only in clinics or hospitals; it happens in the neighborhoods, relationships, stories, and rituals where people gather and feel truly seen.
The evidence for this connection is substantial. The World Health Organization (WHO) synthesized evidence from more than 3,000 studies and found that the arts can support health promotion, illness prevention, and management across a person’s entire lifespan. We are seeing this evidence in new models coming out of the State of Minnesota with their Arts & Health Evaluation Framework, the emergence of State-wide arts & health policies, and the increase of arts prescribing in healthcare settings. As the Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted, health risks of chronic loneliness are as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day – and engaging with museums has shown to play a major role in combating feelings of isolation.
So for us as evaluators, this intersection pushes us to ask better questions. It is not enough to simply prove that arts and culture “work” in a vacuum. Instead, we must ask: For whom? In what settings? And whose definitions of health, healing, and value are we centering? By combining health evaluation methods with participatory and culturally responsive approaches, we can look beyond symptom reduction and begin measuring constructs like belonging, joy, trust, and agency.
For those interested in exploring how the arts can support health and well-being, we recommend checking out these resources:
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 do so using the form on our website. 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.