Dr Gail Kenning is a researcher and artist working with socially engaged practices, participatory engagement and co-design approaches to understand and support psychosocial wellbeing. With a focus on older people, intergenerational practice and mental health she works with the Art Gallery of New South Wales co-developing the Art and Dementia program and PAUSE a program for carers in Palliative Care. Kenning is currently using EmbodiMap – a VR psychosocial engagement tool – working with War Memorial Hospital and developing VR nature and wellbeing experiences for communities in the Woollahra Municipal Council area. Kenning has developed co-design and psychosocial practices for people with dementia including for advanced stages (as acknowledged by Alzheimer’s Society UK) that involve participatory workshops, storytelling, and creative making. arts-based discussion and use of Visual Matrix (Kenning, 2022, Froggett, Manley, & Roy, 2015). She engages in a range of qualitative and psychosocial methods and phenomenological/deep listening analysis approaches and has advised on how qualitative data can inform the development of clinical trials involving social and creative engagements (Kenning, G., Ee, N., Xu, Y., Luu, B. L., Ward, S. A., Goldwater, M. B., . . . Peters, R. (2021). Intergenerational Practice in the Community—What Does the Community Think? Social Sciences, 10(10). doi:10.3390/socsci10100374).

Gail was part of the development team on the award winning The Visit—a immersive exploration of the lived experience of dementia— and published in Dementia and The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Times of Crisis on its use of verbatim approaches to understand lived experience and it how it cultivates empathy (Kenning, Bennett, & Kuchelmeister, 2022; Papadopoulos et al., 2021). She is secretary of the Arts Health Network NSW and ACT (AHNNA) and has affiliations with NeuRA UNSW, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Eindhoven University and University of Technology Sydney.