This collection documents diverse approaches in creative arts engagement, building metaphoric bridges across the field with an emphasis on creativity and well-being in education and community development.

Focussing on applied arts and health practice, research, scholarship, expressive arts therapy, community and education, the book advances integrative and multimodal art-based processes. This book aims to give prominence to art-based research and provides useful support to those working and researching across applied arts and health, education and community contexts. The book brings together a collection of world-leading authors in the field spanning a range of cultures, documenting projects and significantly adding to cohesive research in the field.

In continuing to advance applied arts and health, whilst furthering a commitment to art-based research, this new book places emphasis upon the artistic research methodology, underlining that art (performing art and visual art) is the evidence. It offers the field an integral vision for the arts both theoretically and practically. Further, the book breaks down the silos of practice that have been unhelpful in their development.

The audience for this book will include art-based researchers, expressive arts practitioners and scholars, arts educators, and those interested in bridging the gap between arts and health practice. Masters and doctoral level students in art-based research, participatory research, and qualitative research with an arts-focus are another audience for the book. All applied arts and health practitioners and academics, arts educators, art therapists and university PaR programmes. Whilst of particular use to postgraduate students, this text will also be useful to final year undergraduate students in assisting them with creative practice-based dissertations and projects. Also useful to researchers, practitioners and a range of research degree programmes in applied arts and health, education and community engagement.

Ross W. Prior is Professor of Learning and Teaching in the Arts in Higher Education at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Prior is best known for his books Teaching Actors and Using Arts as Research in Learning and Teaching (Intellect) and his work in applied arts and health as founding principal editor of the Journal of Applied Arts and Health, first published in 2010.

Professor Mitchell Kossak is a professor and former director in the Expressive Therapies programme at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA as well as a licensed clinical counsellor and registered expressive arts therapist who has presented his work and research on rhythmic attunement, improvisation, psychospiritual and community-based approaches to working with trauma at conferences nationally and internationally. He is the Associate Editor of the international Journal of Applied Arts and Health and author of Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward an Understanding of Embodied Empathy.

Teresa A. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Bronx Community College (City University of New York/CUNY) in the USA. She is the author of Post-Show Discussions in New Play Development (2014), the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Applied Arts and Health (Intellect), and the Producer of New Plays for Young Audiences at New York University.