The School of the Arts welcomes Dr. Mark Gilbert, artist-researcher-teacher-activist, to UNO. Mark is the first faculty member jointly appointed to Art & Art History and Medical Humanities. As such he will contribute to the long-standing art program and the rapidly-expanding medical humanities major and minor. He will also act as a liaison with other colleges on campus, the University of Nebraska’s Medical Center and the broader Omaha community.

Mark brings to UNO the unique capacity to demonstrate and develop the connection between art, medical professionals and patients. How art and medicine inform each other is a central question in Mark’s research and teaching. One aspect of his research examines how art can strengthen a medical professional’s observational skills to become more sensitive to patients’ needs. His cross-disciplinary work also addresses the ethical and relational considerations of arts’ research in a medical context.

In the fall of 2018, his Portraits of Care exhibition was held in the Criss Library Osborne Family Gallery. Supported by the Art Institute of Chicago and UNO’s CFAM, the Mark Gilbert: Portraits in Health Care exhibition, which was scheduled to appear in Chicago’s International Museum of Surgical Science, has been postponed until June of 2021.