Dr Dominik Havsteen-Franklin
Professor of Practice in Arts Therapies

Summary

Dominik Havsteen-Franklin’s work explores how arts therapies and creative health practices contribute to personal, social, technological, and systemic change. As Professor of Practice in Arts Therapies at Brunel University London and Consultant in Arts Psychotherapies at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, he works across clinical practice, research, education, public health, digital innovation, and cultural partnership.

His scholarship is concerned with the conditions through which change becomes possible. Drawing on complexity theory, critical realism, new materialist and posthumanist thought, systems thinking, ecological models, mentalization-based approaches, and critically pluralist arts therapies theory, Dominik examines how wellbeing emerges through relations between people, materials, places, institutions, cultures, technologies, and forms of knowledge.

A central theme in his recent work is the relationship between creativity, artificial intelligence, and wellbeing. He is interested in how AI and digital systems organise patterns of convergence and divergence: how they can narrow complex experience through prediction, classification, optimisation, and repetition, but also how they may support generative reflection, relational insight, and imaginative forms of inquiry when developed within ethical and participatory frameworks.

His methodological work spans realist evaluation, arts-based inquiry, participatory research, mixed-methods evaluation, psychometric development, and complexity-informed programme design. He is particularly interested in methods that can account for emergence, uncertainty, power, context, and lived experience, especially where conventional models of evidence struggle to capture the relational, material, and ecological dimensions of arts-based practice.

Dominik’s current projects include research on ethical digital creative health through p_ART_icipate!, education and wellbeing through the Art of Wellbeing in Education Project, AI-informed approaches to relational and linguistic change in mental health contexts, and creative systems approaches to NHS team development and organisational learning (CaRE Project). His work with teams focuses on how affect, communication, leadership, professional identity, institutional pressures, and psychological safety interact within complex organisational ecologies.

Across these projects, Dominik works with partners in health services, higher education, cultural organisations, digital innovation, community settings, and international arts therapies networks. His research seeks to develop approaches that are theoretically rigorous, practically useful, and accountable to the communities, practitioners, institutions, and technologies through which contemporary wellbeing practices are shaped.

Qualifications

PhD in psychoanalysis

MSc Psychodynamics of Human Development

Accredited Art Psychotherapist, Dynamic Interpersonal Therapist, Mentalization Based Treatment Therapist

Responsibility

Arts, Health and Social Change Group

Brunel Arts and Health / CNWL NHS Arts Psychotherapies Partnership