SARK is an author, artist and teacher on the subject of creativity who was featured on the PBS series Women of Wisdom and Power. She practices what she teaches and lives in a Magic Cottage in San Francisco. She has written many books including Make Your Creative Dreams REAL, Prosperity Pie, Change Your Life Without Getting Out of Bed and A Creative Companion. You can visit her website at www.planetsark.com.

Sharon Siskin has an extensive national exhibition record, showing her work in museums, galleries and public sites for more than 27 years.

She is the recipient of awards and grants that include a Visual Arts Fellowship from the California Arts Council in 2003, the 2001 Potrero Nuevo Prize, Noetic Arts Program Community Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Market Street Art in Transit Commission and 12 California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grants for community-based public art projects in the San Francisco Bay Area AIDS support service community and in the City of Berkeley homeless women and children services community.

She was the Artist in Residence at San Francisco Recycling & Disposal, Inc. in the summer of 2004. Her artwork has been featured in numerous publications including Women Artists in the American West, edited by Susan Ressler, Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, by Lucy Lippard, Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists, edited by Moira Roth and Site to Sight, Mapping Bay Area Visual Culture, edited by Lydia Mathiews.

She is currently Assistant Professor of Drawing at the University of San Francisco and co-directs with Professor Richard Kamler Arts Outreach: The Artist as Citizen, a year-long program which seeks to embed student art practitioners into communities to collaboratively engage in community-based art. She has also taught as a member of the Core Faculty as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Department of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University and California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California State University at Hayward and the University of New Mexico as well as at several California Community Colleges.

She is a recognized leader in the field of community-based public art and is the founder of Positive Art in 1988, an art project in the Bay Area AIDS community continuing to provide a model for many communities internationally. She has lectured extensively in art colleges, universities, professional conferences, galleries and museums throughout the United States.

2007 marks the tenth anniversary of the Arts and Healing Network Award.  Each year the Arts and Healing Network honors a healing artist who is truly making a difference in the world with an award of $10,000. The Network offers this award as a surprise gift. There is no application. Our hope is that this award will offer the recipient inspiration and support to continue and expand their outstanding work.  

To celebrate the award's anniversary, we asked each of the award winners to tell us a little bit about their work today, and why they think art is healing or a catalyst for positive change.  Some of their stories are short, some are long, but all of them are inspiring examples of the healing power of art:

1998 Bill Witherspoon
1999 Marilyn Wood
2000 Betsy Damon
2001 Bonnie Ora Sherk
2002 Lily Yeh
2003 Patricia Johanson
2004 Bill Talen
2005 Tim Lefens
2006 Anna Halperin
2007 Lynne Hull

The Arts and Healing Podcast is a project of The Arts and Healing Network, an online resource for people interested in the healing potential of art.  You can join the Arts and Healing Network community at artheals.org and you can contact us anytime at ahn@artheals.org.

Alli is a Co-Founder and the Development & Events Director of Art in Action, Youth Leadership Training. She conducts the dance, theater, and anti-oppression workshops at the Art in Action camps.  She is also the Art and Media Director for Reclaim the Future at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland.

Alli is a co-founder of Dancers Without Borders, Another World in Possible Road Shows, and the twelve-year-old Radical Performance Fest. She also co-founded Art and Revolution, a national movement of artist and activists. She has been a presenter on radio shows, at conferences, and has taught art activism across the U.S. and Canada. Her essays have appeared in Democratizing the Global Economy, Global Uprising, Voices from the WTO, The Political Edge and How to Stop the Next War Now. Currently, Alli is working to complete her book, Movements for Mass Movements.