In 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges published a monograph — something like a very large position paper — titled "The Fundamental Role of Arts and Humanities in Medical Education." Today, the publication is known in the field as FRAHME (as in picture frame), and it provided a framework whose influence has proved deep and sustaining.
“Arts and health” as a discipline did not originate with FRAHME, nor was FRAHME the culmination of the movement. Rather, it offered further evidence of a burgeoning field. Narrowly focused, it nonetheless revealed larger trends unfolding around us. Its audience included medical educators, medical and health sciences faculty and students, physicians and leaders in academic medical communities. Its influence was partly the result of a confluence of circumstances in the arts, the health and medical sciences, and society and culture more broadly.
For the arts and arts education, the first 20 years of the 21st century were marked by significant shifts — many due to the emergence of powerful new technologies — in how the arts were taught and experienced by practitioners, scholars and audiences.
Likewise, the early 21st century brought significant transformation in health care delivery, unprecedented rates of physician burnout (or at least rates not previously well documented), unforeseen public health crises — most notably the opioid epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, the latter coinciding with work on FRAHME — deeper study of long-standing societal health disparities, and waves of civil and social unrest.
FRAHME’s influence also stemmed from an evolving ecosystem in which the arts were increasingly recognized as essential rather than ornamental to research and practice in sectors such as urban planning, higher education, medicine and the health sciences. The Mellon Research Project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for example, recognized the potential of arts and health integration from a research and funding perspective in its now decade-old report, Surveying the Landscape: Arts Integration at Research Universities. Scholarship, especially in the United States and Great Britain, has continued to produce substantive, evidence-based research on the role of the arts in healing. Two publications by British scholar Daisy Fancourt are especially notable: Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, published by Cornerstone Press in 2026.
More locally, multiple versions of the city of Houston’s Arts and Cultural Plan have observed that Houston’s strengths are historically concentrated in four domains: science, medicine, industry and the arts. Center for Houston's Future has made similar observations in its Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Indicator Report.
Within this evolving ecosystem, it was natural for the University of Houston and the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts to position themselves as leaders in the arts and health space. Over the past six years, that work has included academic programming, research and engagement at the community, national and international levels.
Academic programming has taken two primary forms. The Graduate Certificate Program in Arts and Health launched in 2020 with a target audience of arts and health administrators working in health care institutions. The Bachelor of Music Therapy program opened in 2025 as the first program of its kind in Houston to train music therapists for clinical work in health care settings.
Both programs were logical additions for several reasons:
· documented demand from employers and students
· the opening of the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine with its emphasis on addressing the shortage of primary care physicians in Texas
· Houston’s status as home to the Texas Medical Center, with its 61 institutions, 120,000 employees and 50 million developed square feet; and the growing number of TMC institutions investing in research-based arts and health programs shown to improve health outcomes and institutional performance.
The certificate program provides Houston with administrative expertise for its expanding array of institutional arts and health programs. Hospitals need experienced administrators to lead these initiatives, and the program provides the training and professional credentialing they require. The music therapy program fills a similar gap. The Texas Medical Center employs a higher concentration of music therapists per capita than any other medical center in the country. In the last six months of 2019, when feasibility studies began, there were 4,531 job postings in the United States seeking “music therapy,” while only 458 bachelor’s degrees were conferred in the field that year. At the time, no institution in Houston — and only five in Texas — offered a music therapy degree.
The university developed the program, secured local and state approvals, and earned disciplinary accreditation from the American Music Therapy Association and the National Association of Schools of Music. It also recruited and appointed Ed Roth — who for two decades led a successful program at Western Michigan University — as the Alice and Fletcher Pratt Endowed Professor and Aspire Initiative Endowed Director of Music Therapy in 2024. The University of Houston admitted its first music therapy students in 2025.
Research and engagement in arts and health complement and enhance the university’s academic mission. In 2020, the university received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support “Engaging Arts and Culture for Vaccine Confidence,” a citywide arts and public health initiative aimed at raising vaccine awareness during the pandemic.
In 2022, a research team from the McGovern College of the Arts and the Fertitta Family College of Medicine published a study in Psychology of Music on the effects of music on the mental health of college students during the pandemic. Also in 2022, Houston served as one of six worldwide hosts of the “Healing Arts” conference series on arts and health integration. Titled “Healing Arts Houston: Collaborating for Medical Humanities, Professional Development, and Community Health,” the event was organized jointly with the Arts and Health Division of the World Health Organization and institutions including Johns Hopkins University, University of Florida and New York University. In 2024, Houston also hosted the three-day annual meeting of the National Organization for Arts in Health, which provides professional administrative credentialing in the field.
Houston is a global center for innovative health care and medical education. The University of Houston is ensuring that those innovations include integrative approaches to arts and health.