From Mental Health to Climate & Health: Wellcome Trust Curatorial Research Fellow Rebecca Jacobs co-creates cultures of change with collaborators at CUNY and around the world

February 26, 2024

Since fall of 2019, Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, PhD has been based at CUNY’s Center for the Humanities (CftH) as the Wellcome Trust Curatorial Research Fellow, where she has been the New York cultural lead for Mindscapes, Wellcome’s international cultural program about mental health.

For New York’s final public Mindscapes programming in 2023, Dr. Jacobs assisted in the development of Isometric Studio’s joyous and inclusive public design installation Cloud Swing
at Grounds for Sculpture, and an evening public program on climate and mental health in fiction organized by New York Public Library during Climate Week 2023. She also wrote a piece for Aeon, “The right to bathe,” about access to ‘blue spaces’ in cities and collective well being, and created a Mindscapes international community archive with her collaborators in Berlin, Bengaluru, London, and Tokyo.

Learn more about the international team behind Mindscapes here:

Building on her work on Mindscapes, Dr. Jacobs will collaborate with Wellcome’s London-based international cultural partnerships team from her position at the Graduate Center to develop programming on climate and health. She is working with Wellcome’s international research and policy networks and cultural partners including The Climate Group and American Museum of Natural History on new programming that puts health at the heart of climate action at New York Climate Week 2024 and beyond. Stay tuned!