Welcome and thank you for visiting my website!
I am Michael Tan, an arts-health practitioner, creative health researcher, artist, and educator from Singapore. My practice and research explore, interrogate, and imagine the future of care through creative practice to promote human flourishing. My current inquiries are concerned with mental health literacy, ageing, nature connectedness, compassionate communities, end-of-life planning and loss,  health justice, and creative critical pedagogy.

My training in art and design, humanities, and social science has led me to develop a growing track record of interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral creative health research collaborations with colleagues within and outside of academia to transform the culture of care through creativity.

I have served as grant reviewer, PhD examiner, guest editor and reviewer for international peer-reviewed journals for work at the intersection of Creative practice, health, and wellbeing (e.g. Arts and Health, Wellcome Open Research, The Gerontologist, Frontiers). I also held appointments as external examiner and member of the advisory committee e.g.  (Arts and Health at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital) and  advisory board of Journal (Design for Health).

I am currently an Associate Professor in Art and Design at Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. In my current role, I have developed the new MA in Design for Health Programme and am supporting postgraduate education (PhD & MA). I was selected from a UK-wide open call, to join the inaugural National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) GROW Mental Health Research Programme (Summer 2022 cohort), and was a visiting research fellow (Summer 2022) at the Centre for Arts, Design, Social Research for Cosmological Gardens: Cultivating Caring Cultures.

Notable contributions

• led seminal research on the State of arts and health development in Singapore,
• established the Arts and Health Repository Singapore, an active online resource documenting the development of the arts and health field in Singapore,
• developed a practice framework to foster a caring arts-health practice.
• developed and taught an interdisciplinary module on Arts, Ageing, and Wellbeing for the MSc in Applied Gerontology programme, School of Social Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  

Ongoing and recent projects

• WHO Lancet Series (2023- ongoing) – in collaboration with WHO and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab. Co-lead of Paper 2 – Arts participation as a health behaviour: A systematic review of evidence for the roles of the arts in Non-communicable Disease (NCD) prevention and health promotion

• UKRI-AHRC Health Inequalities Programme(2024-ongoing): Mobilising community assets to tackle health inequalities programme. Co-Investigator in Creative health boards: a new model for embedding creative health and community assets in health systems across the UK (PI: Chris Dayson)

• When Seasons Change – Reflecting on end-of-life with nature & creativity (2022- Present).

• Dying Matters – a participatory performance exploring our struggles to talk openly about death.
• Gestures of Care –  a creative movement workshop exploring the nuances in nonverbal aspects of caring and their perceptiveness.
• Care and kindness workshop – a creative-based workshop for mental health nursing students’ use during their community placement in schools. 
• Art, Visual Literacy, and Dermatology workshop – a creative workshop for dermal clinicians involving visual art activities and visual art viewing
• Stories from the Pandemic – in partnership with Opus, Compassionate Sheffield, Sheffield City Council, Sheffield City Archives, and Lab 4 Living, the project aims to gather stories from the people of Sheffield to inform and strengthen the city’s memorial plans. 
• collaborations include The Repository for Arts and Health Resources (Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health, Canterbury Christ Church University), The A-health Project (Mcgill University- Nanyang Technological University), University of Sheffield Deepend PPI Network and Palliative Care Studies Advisory Group and Compassionate Sheffield.

I am also keen to explore collaboration or supervise projects related to, but not limited to the following lines of inquiry:

• The Future of Care and wellbeing
• Therapeutic engagements/ experience 
• Therapeutic Objects
• Communicating Health
• Creative Practice and Social Inquiry

 Please feel free to get in touch to explore collaboration or supervision on projects related to art and design, culture, and creativity for health and wellbeing,

orcid.org/0000-0001-8227-0407