Biography 

Dr Barbara Doran is an artist, researcher and educator who specialises in identifying creative opportunities that respond to complex challenges and translating them into action. Her work explores creative intelligence as a living cultural process, investigating how embodied perception and pattern recognition shape the stories individuals and societies live by.

With more than 30 years’ experience across public health, urban and regional planning, health psychology and the arts, Dr Barbara Doran works at the intersection of artistic practice, cultural research and collective wellbeing. As an artist-facilitator she has worked extensively with body mapping and a wide range of arts-based methods, including visual storytelling, participatory inquiry, installation and studio-based practices that help people explore lived experience and recognise patterns shaping their lives and environments.

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Through artistic practice, participatory research and transdisciplinary collaboration, she helps people recognise patterns in themselves and their communities and work with them creatively, so they remain alive and open to new possibilities. Her work cultivates creative intelligence as an intrinsic human capacity for navigating complexity, expanding perception and imagining more life-affirming futures.

Dr Barbara Doran is the lead curator of the SPHERE Knowledge Translation Platform Artist-in-Residence program and President of the Arts Health Network NSW/ACT. She is also the author of three books that combine theory, case studies and creative methods, including Creative Reboot: Catalysing Creative Intelligence and Creative Practice and Embodied Narratives: Transdisciplinary Inquiry through the Body, Story, and System, which distils three decades of artistic practice into her framework of Embodied Matter Exploration (EME).