Zeina Ahmed Ismail is a creative health practitioner and researcher whose work focuses on the people holding space for others: artists, facilitators and practitioners working around migration, mental health and social justice. She is currently completing an MASc in Creative Health at UCL and works with London Arts and Health one day a week, contributing to the Creative Health Mapping Project and wider research and learning activities.
With London Arts and Health, Zeina has helped map over 150 creative health, arts and wellbeing initiatives across London, engaging with grassroots groups, NHS partners, cultural institutions and community organisations. Her work supports a clearer picture of who is doing what, where, and under what conditions – particularly for practitioners working in under‑resourced or complex settings. She is interested in how mapping and research can translate into practical support, visibility and more sustainable infrastructures for those delivering creative health work on the ground.
Zeina’s practice is shaped strongly by her own lived experience. She is Egyptian, born in Belgium, and grew up between Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Singapore and the UK. Constant movement, language loss and recovery, and navigating different education and health systems have made questions of belonging, access and “who gets to feel at home” central to how she thinks. An ADHD diagnosis in early adulthood added another layer to this, sharpening her interest in how neurodivergent practitioners and participants experience creative health spaces and what they need to thrive.
Alongside London Arts and Health, Zeina works with Counterpoints Arts, where she focuses on mental health and arts in the context of migration and sanctuary. She has led qualitative research into Refugee Week arts programming and mental health, producing a 164‑page internal report and the public‑facing “Spaces of Care” resource and practical guidance. This work draws on the expertise of artists, community organisers and facilitators with lived experience of migration, and explores how creative programmes function as informal spaces of care within hostile immigration systems.
Her earlier roles include residential mental health and learning disability support work in the UK, co‑designing arts‑based workshops and meditation resources at a psychology clinic in Singapore, and long‑term volunteering and fundraising in Indonesia, Jordan and Singapore. She founded a multi‑year student initiative that raised over SGD 90,000 for community causes, and has supported charity work with refugee and low‑income communities in Amman, Wadi Rum and Petra.
Across these contexts, Zeina’s practice is grounded in trauma‑informed, culturally responsive approaches and a commitment to centring lived experience – particularly that of facilitators and practitioners – in the design and delivery of arts and health programmes. She is especially interested in how creative health infrastructures can better sustain the wellbeing of those doing the holding, as well as the communities they work alongside.
