March 1, 2025
Yuko Taniguchi is an assistant professor in the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester and joined the Institute for Advanced Study as a Residential Faculty Fellow in Fall 2024.
Taniguchi’s work explores the intersection of healing through various creative practices within a medical environment. Her current research project investigates if creative activities can benefit adolescents with depression by introducing more flexible ways of thinking, helping them recognize their creative talents, and developing more positive views of themselves. She is also the author of a collection of poems, Foreign Wife Elegy (Coffee House Press, 2004); a novel, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press, 2007), and is at work on several new projects.
IAS Communications Assistant Lana Burling spoke with Taniguchi about her work.
Lana Burling: Tell us a little bit about your job! What led you to integrate your writing background with medicine and healthcare?
Yuko Taniguchi: Essentially, my job consists of incorporating creativity in a medical setting by designing and facilitating creativity-based programs while simultaneously studying their impact. I completed an MFA program at the U of M as a poet and then moved to Rochester, where I began offering creative writing courses and workshops for patients and healthcare professionals. This quickly became a program that clinicians wanted to research, so I invited my students from the Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences (BSHS) program to be a part of the study. All of these things eventually became the Arts in Health field that I am a part of today.
LB: You focus on healing through creativity—can you describe the process you use to integrate creative practices like writing and art into the healing process?
YT: Ultimately, I don’t really think about medium. We use lots of different methods in our work—like writing and art—but it’s more about how artists think and navigate life, which I try to capture throughout my sessions. For instance, curiosity is a concept that our body tends to be aware of but that our mind struggles to fully grasp. In my sessions, I am constantly trying to instill that sensation of “I have never done this before.” I kind of have to trick everybody into trying something new; otherwise, new insight would never come through! When I work with kids with anxiety and depression, it can be difficult for these individuals to change their mindset. I focus on how I can support opening up their mind for new information to come through. As an artist, I put more emphasis on practice and creativity rather than healing because the term “recovery” can add pressure. Instead, the focus is on creating something; healing is a consequence from engaging in the creative process. If participants can focus on their own creative activities, then that’s when the magic happens: they have new, interesting thoughts and creations. Their own authentic expressions become the source of inspiration. My job is primarily about mindset and creating space for individuals to try something new.
LB: How do you measure the effectiveness of creativity-based activities in promoting mental health recovery among young people?
YT: Measuring is a constant struggle because while we may witness something that we think is groundbreaking, distilling human behaviors into evidence is difficult. Our interdisciplinary research team includes psychiatrists, psychologists, a biostatistician, an MRI physicist, professional artists, undergraduate and graduate students, post-baccalaureate scholars, research staff, and art museum staff. In our quantitative studies, we conduct pre- and post- assessments. For some studies, participants go through an MRI while they respond to creative prompts. Psychologists will conduct multiple cognitive tests and research assistants take observation notes during the creative workshops. My responsibility is to oversee qualitative analysis. We also conduct interviews with the participants and their parents. We are learning that different things work for different people. Thus, we need to offer a wide arrangement of options, which can be difficult for our research because we often want to name what works. Ultimately, we look for any shifts in data and then focus on examining what was meaningful and what processes might have been the most therapeutic.
LB: What has been one of your most valuable experiences so far?
YT: Essentially, when someone changes, their entire ecosystem is impacted. For instance, our Creativity Camp study was an eight-day program similar to an artists retreat, where adolescents with anxiety and depression participated. Many parents reported significant changes in their children's behavior and mood. What we didn’t expect was how significantly parents were affected by their children's change. Parents asked what we did that led to this positive change and expressed to us how much their children’s behavior had drastically shifted. While we initially did not plan to study the parents, we decided to capture parents’ voices and articulate what they had indirectly experienced through the Creativity Camp study.
LB: Let’s change directions and talk a bit about your background. What sparked your interest in writing, and more specifically, poetry?
YT: I love poetry because it is a medium with a concentrated format. When a topic is vast and full, we turn to poetry. Poetry has guided my focus by challenging me to convey a profound idea through a more concise, yet deeper medium. Poetry is very similar to qualitative research—both poetry and research are about several things—but they are not about everything. They are flexible, but they also have this sort of boundary. As a poet, I'm constantly going back and reviewing and editing until something feels right. It's a way for me to organize my thoughts, and I apply the way I think as a poet to everything, and that's why everything takes time for me.
LB: As a poet and novelist, how has your own creative practice influenced your perspective on healing and recovery?
YT: Poetry is useful because it can be expressed and promoted in so many different ways. My poem “Inside My Eyes” is about how our imagination just sort of happens once we close our eyes. So, then I wondered what kind of imagination someone else wants to be engaged in when they close their eyes. I turned it into a curriculum and then collaborated with visual artists who turned it into a motion poem where the film was displayed on the ceiling of a museum, and participants were required to lie down, watch, and then take a ten-minute nap. That was an interesting process because it allowed me to collaborate with different forms and mediums. It is a little bit more fluid, and that’s how I practice as an artist.
LB: How is the IAS supporting your research?
YT: It was a pleasant surprise to be surrounded by such wonderful people that are truly curious and excited to learn something new. No matter what field someone is in, they are all so engaging and open to sharing their feedback. They also invited me to share my thoughts and feedback with them. Academia is not always a safe space—especially as an individual whose first language is not English—so at times it can feel overwhelming. But everyone from the IAS was extremely supportive of my work and engaged in a way so that we were able to learn from each other.
LB: How do you plan to take your research and work back to your students?
YT: I ask my student researchers what they see in the qualitative research data. Their perspective as young adults is extremely important, especially in regards to our work with adolescents. They notice something that I do not catch. By engaging in the Creativity and Wellbeing studies, many students have become interested in exploring the field of mental health or social work. Ultimately, my students are collaborators; they are encouraged to experience and express their creative abilities and I am excited to see where they will go in the future.
Read More: Creative community collaboration benefits college and high school students’ mental health
Lana Burling (she/her) assists in developing content to support the outreach efforts of the IAS. She is a student at the U of M with a passion for writing and creating. In 2024, Lana was awarded Volunteer of the Year by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for her interviewing and writing done for the city’s annual music festival.