Dr Sylvan Baker
Dr Sylvan Baker SFHEA is a Care Experienced researcher and practitioner. He is the Ethics & Integrity Lead for the Department of Practice and a Senior Lecturer in Community Performance and Applied Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
His practice research explores the ways aesthetic practices, creative engagement and collective dialogue can stimulate reflection, action and change. He currently serves as an Advisory Board member for UKRI’s Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities programme, a founding member of Advocates for Representation in Creative Health (ARCH), a member of the Hard Art Collective and an Associate Artist with the award-winning Arts & Health initiative, Performing Medicine.
Sylvan is one of the co-founders of the multi-award-winning research project The Verbatim Formula, where he collaborates with Care Experienced people to co-facilitate an expertise-by-experience diagnostic into the impacts of the UK care system. As Deputy-Principal Investigator for the UKRI RE-STAR: Regulating Emotion – Strengthening Adolescent Resilience project, he supported neurodivergent young researchers in the creation of resources to develop neurodivergent-sensitive secondary school environments.
Prof. Dr Sara Houston
Prof. Dr Sara Houston is a leading expert in community and socially engaged dance. She is Professor of Dance and Community Engagement at University of Roehampton, UK, where she is also Director of the Centre for Research in Arts and Creative Exchange and Co-Director of the AHRC Consortium for Researching Inclusive Cultures in the Arts. Her pioneering research work examined the experience of people with Parkinson’s dancing, for which she won the BUPA Foundation Prize in 2011 and she published the defining monograph Dancing with Parkinson’s in 2019. As part of her commitment to helping augment high quality participatory dance work, Sara leads professional development courses and workshops for dance artists internationally. Her work in this area also includes the open access digital Soft Skills in Dance: A Guidebook to Enhance your Practice, co-authored with dramaturg Monica Gillette in 2022. Other awards include a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship prize and finalist for the National Public Engagement Awards for public communication of her work. For many years Sara was Chair of the Board of People Dancing in the UK and she continues to work closely with dance organisations with a community remit around the world as a consultant, researcher and workshop leader. Currently, Sara is consultant for the Jockey Club Dance Well programme in Hong Kong. She lives in London with her two grown up boys and the ragdoll cat, Ponyo.
Prof. Raymond MacDonald
Prof. Raymond MacDonald is Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation at the University of Edinburgh, a Chartered Health Psychologist, saxophonist and composer. His interdisciplinary research explores music, improvisation, creativity, identity, communication, health and wellbeing, with a particular emphasis on the psychological and social processes underpinning collaborative musical activity. His work conceptualises improvisation as a uniquely creative, social and accessible form of music-making through which new forms of interaction, identity and collective creativity can emerge.
MacDonald has over 100 academic publications spanning music psychology, improvisation, creativity, health and wellbeing, and musical identities. He was Editor of Psychology of Music from 2006 to 2012 and has co-edited five books, including Musical Identities (2002), Music, Health and Wellbeing (2012), and The Handbook of Musical Identities (2017). Recent books include The Art of Becoming: How Group Improvisation Works (2021), co-authored with Graeme Wilson, and New Directions in Musical Collaborative Creativity (2025), co-authored with Maria Sappho, Tia DeNora, Robert Burke and Ross Birrell.
His research is closely integrated with creative practice. As a saxophonist and composer, he has released over 80 recordings, toured and broadcast internationally, and developed interdisciplinary collaborations spanning music, visual art, psychology and artificial intelligence.
