Art for Our Common Good: Creativity, Health, and Civic Life | Part 2
Dr. Catherine Olweny and Host Lisa Simms Booth
What role can art play in helping us meet this moment? As communities face growing loneliness, burnout, environmental anxiety, and civic division, the arts can create spaces for healing, connection, and hope.
In this podcast, Commonweal Board Member Lisa Simms Booth continues the conversation with the New School’s summer visiting scholar Catherine Olweny. Her many life experiences and training led her to work as a paediatric anaesthetist, and also to work as a therapist helping clinicians develop a greater ability to look and listen closely, to attend to patients and their family, to be curious and attentive, and to be fully present. Cultivating this presence—in part using art, narrative, and imagination—is a gift she found in her own life, one she shares with other clinicians, and one we can learn from as well.
Co-presented with Visual Thinking Strategies, Collaborations: Teachers and Artists, California for the Arts, Flight School, Fordham University Creative Writing Program, Jasper Inclusion Advisors, Kularts, National Organization for Arts in Health, Panta Rhea, Power of Hope, ILALI, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, Stanford Arts, and University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine. | Artwork credit: “River Braid” by Jon Marro
Dr. Catherine Olweny
Catherine is Commonweal New School’s Visiting Scholar in July 2026. She is a consultant paediatric anaesthetist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, where she has worked since 2009. She has special interest in the prevention and management of procedural anxiety and distress and the prevention of medical trauma. She incorporates hypnosis, Visual Thinking Strategies, the humanities, narrative, and the imagination into her work, which has allowed her to shift the way she teaches language and communication in healthcare contexts.
Lisa Simms Booth
Host
Lisa serves as the executive director of the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts located on U Street in Washington, DC. Smith Center’s mission is to provide whole-person care and support—for people with cancer, their caregivers and providers—that nurtures healing and wellness through integrative and arts-based practices, programs, gallery exhibitions and community events. Lisa serves on the Commonweal Board of Directors, and also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Arts in Health (NOAH), a membership organization that builds community to amplify, educate about, and advocate for the power of the arts to improve health and wellbeing for all people.
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