Professor Katherine Boydell is a qualitative methodologist who founded the world-first award-winning multidisciplinary Arts-based Knowledge Translation (AKT) Lab at the Black Dog Institute in Sydney Australia. Her program of research uses art forms to produce and disseminate knowledge, evaluate its impact and make research accessible beyond academia.

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Katherine is a Health Sociologist and an internationally recognised leader in qualitative inquiry and arts-based knowledge translation in the mental health field. Professor Boydell is also Director of Knowledge Translation for MariduluBudyari Gumal, which has combined 15 organisations (spanning local health districts, specialty health networks, universities and medical research institutes) to create the Sydney Partnership in Health, Education, Research and Enterprise (SPHERE); an NHMRC advanced health research translation centre. This program of work involves a series of research-based heath installations in universities, hospitals, public libraries, shopping centres and office building lobbies. 

Professor Boydell is at the forefront of international research on the lives of individuals experiencing mental health issues. She is renowned for her innovative knowledge translation strategies that reduce the knowledge-to-practice gap and engage stakeholders beyond academia. In particular, is her work on body mapping in research - she recently launched the global consortium on body mapping, bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the globe. She has used novel visual, performative and literary arts-based knowledge translation strategies to ensure that empirical research gets to the people who need to know (practitioners, health consumers and their families) and who often do not access traditional academic outputs such as peer-reviewed papers and scientific presentations. She has shown that where research participants use art forms to share their lived experience led to greater social inclusion and enhanced wellbeing. She has published 300+ journal articles, book chapters and books and these academic outputs are accompanied by non-traditional research outputs.