Dr Diletta De Cristofaro has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement grant for a project titled “Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and its Disorders”.
Hosted by Northumbria University, the project is a collaboration between Dr De Cristofaro, the team of the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research directed by Prof Jason Ellis, The Sleep Charity, and artist and creative producer Chiara Dellerba. It will result in a workshop series, an online art exhibition, and resources.
Supported by The Sleep Charity’s expertise we will design a hybrid workshop series in which participants from the Newcastle area having difficulties sleeping will come together with researchers and the artist to share stories, explore sleep and wellbeing knowledge, and express their lived experiences of sleep and sleep disorders creatively.
The creative outputs produced at the workshops will be collected into an online exhibition. This exhibition will also feature creativity prompts that will allow a wider audience to delve into their experiences of sleep. Responses submitted to these prompts will be added to the exhibition, creating an ever-expanding archive.
The online resources created by the researchers with The Sleep Charity will bridge the literary/cultural side of sleep and the psychology of sleep, engaging new audiences with multidisciplinary research and facilitating individual reflections and independent workshops.
The project aims at co-producing knowledge of sleep and its disorders with workshop participants, stimulating public understanding and empathy, and fostering wellbeing.
Further information and the sign-up form for the workshop series is available on the project’s dedicated page on this website.
Image credit: Chiara Dellerba.
