Dr Dominik Havsteen-Franklin
Professor of Practice in Arts Therapies

Research area(s)

• Arts therapies and creative health
• Social art therapy and arts-based approaches to social change
• Digital creative health, digital wellbeing, and ethical online practice
• Artificial intelligence, creativity, mental health, and wellbeing
• Complexity theory, systems thinking, and ecological approaches to care
• Realist evaluation, Living Logic Models, and complexity-informed programme evaluation
• Participatory, arts-based, and practice-based research methods
• Mentalization, relational practice, and psychodynamic approaches in arts therapies
• Team development, organisational learning, and psychological safety in healthcare systems
• Education, curriculum development, and wellbeing in higher education
• Trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and socially situated arts therapies practice
• Psychometric development and evaluation of creative wellbeing measures
• Ethics, regulation, accessibility, and inclusion in creative health and arts therapies
• Interdisciplinary partnerships across health, education, culture, community, and technology sectors

Research Interests

My research explores how arts therapies and creative health practices contribute to wellbeing, mental health, education, social change and systems development. I am particularly interested in relational and ecological approaches to practice, and in how change emerges through interactions between people, materials, places, institutions, technologies and wider socio-political contexts.

My work draws on complexity theory, critical realism, new materialist and posthumanist thought, systems thinking, mentalization-based practice and critically pluralist arts therapies theory. Methodologically, I work across realist evaluation, arts-based research, participatory inquiry, mixed-methods evaluation, psychometric development and complexity-informed programme theory.

Current research interests include digital creative health, ethical wellbeing technologies, artificial intelligence and creativity, convergence and divergence in mental health and wellbeing, arts-based approaches to team development, creative health in education, social art therapy, trauma-informed practice, and context-sensitive approaches to evaluating creative health interventions.

Grants