International Network for the Study of Spirituality
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Spirituality and the Arts Special Interest Group (SASIG)
Chairs: Rev. Prof. June Boyce-Tillman MBE, Dr Lila Moore PhD, Annalisa Burello MSc (bios below)
| In recent years there has been a growing interest in the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This special interest group will meet to discuss this intersection in a variety of forms and mediums such as visual art, music, film, dance, digital, interactive, poetry, time-based and performative art forms. This will include the personal, social and cultural, encompassing both the religious and the spiritual-but-not-religious context. |
SIG DESCRIPTION
The group aims to explore a variety of relationships between the arts and spirituality. These are some possibilities:
- The arts as a spiritual practice
- Spirituality as creative practice
- Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) caused by an encounter with the arts
- The arts and the transformation of consciousness
- The arts, Spirituality and Social Change
Our approach aims to be interdisciplinary, so we will explore the juncture of the arts and spirituality through the lenses of consciousness studies, spirituality studies, religious studies, theology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, health/wellbeing, philosophy, art, aesthetics and literary theories, musicology; and through the lens of different agents: artists, curators, therapists, academics and independent scholars, general public, popular initiatives, etc.
Aims of the SASIG:
- Explore and encourage the development of conceptual criteria to detect and discuss the spiritual qualities in the arts
- Encourage more scholarly research on the relationship between the arts and spirituality
- Explore and encourage the discourse of the spiritual in both public and private spheres of the arts
- Explore and encourage the establishment of conceptual means and language that would be useful to artists who are interested in incorporating aspects of spirituality in their artworks and their practices
To become involved in the SASIG, please register for our next event.
All SIG meetings will be free for INSS members. Non-members are welcome to attend the inaugural event for free and subsequent ones for a small fee. If you enjoy it, please consider joining INSS. Besides other benefits, this will allow you to view the INSS-members-only SASIG page containing profiles of other attendees (if shared), and give you free access to all INSS SIG events.
Our email address is mailto:sasig@spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org
We now have a Youtube channel where you can watch the recordings of our Zoom meetings.
We also created a Facebook group: please join it!
Annalisa Burello completed a Master's Degree in Financial and Monetary Economics at Bocconi University in 1993 which led to a fifteen years career in finance and banking. After leaving banking in 2008, she resurrected her childhood passion for the arts and retrained as a visual artist, attaining a BA (Hon) Photography at the University of Westminster in 2019. Currently, she is completing a Master's degree in Anthropology - Religion in the Contemporary World at the London School of Economics. Annalisa is researching the intersection between art, creativity and spirituality and, following her introduction to McGilchrist's Hemispheric Hypothesis, in empirically exploring how spiritual and creative practices affect the Right Hemisphere and mental health in general. These investigations have brought her to inquire and later adopt meditation and yoga as a body-mind practice to access, release and sustain creative energies via supporting a greater integration of the right and left hemispheric modes of functioning. Her goal is to articulate a framework of spirituality to include artistic practices. Annalisa lives in London and has two children. |
She is a hymn writer with a collection published by Stainer and Bell of inclusive language and ecological hymns – A Rainbow to Heaven. These are used internationally. She is an Anglican priest serving All Saints Church, Tooting. https://www.impulse-music.co.uk/juneboyce-tillman/ |
Lila lectures and writes on the arts, film, and new media in the context of modern and contemporary spirituality, mysticism, gender, cultural theories, and technoetics. She is a lecturer and thesis supervisor for the Alef Trust MSc Programme in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology, and leading the course: Psyche, Cosmos and the Imaginal. Additionally, she has been a lecturer at the Department for the Study of Mysticism and Spirituality at Zefat Academic College in the ancient Kabbalistic town of Safed (2013-2022), teaching BA courses on spiritual cinema and the intersection of spirituality, mysticism and the arts. Her postdoc at the Planetary Collegium of Plymouth University (2015) entitled The Cybernetic Futures Institute is a networked platform, exploring technoetic arts with an emphasis on the spiritual-mystical and occult in art, film, screen-dance, and networked-digital-interactive forms of performance and narrative. Lila regularly presents research papers in academic conferences, and her articles were published in academic journals. She is a member of the editorial board of Consciousness, Spirituality & Transpersonal Psychology journal and the S/He International Journal of Goddess Studies. Lila participates in juried exhibitions and festivals and her digital artworks, films and theoretical writings are archived by Bloomsbury Digital, ACM SIGGRAPH and ADA - Archive of Digital Art. |
The Rev Professor June Boyce-Tillman MBE FRSA
FHEA is an international performer, composer, workshop leader and keynote speaker. She is an Emerita Professor of Applied Music at Winchester University and an Extra-ordinary Professor at North West University, South Africa. She lectures internationally and is concerned with wellbeing, spirituality and radical musical inclusion culturally and personally. She is editing the series on Music and Spirituality for the publisher Peter Lang which includes her book, Experiencing Music-Restoring the Spiritual; Music as Wellbeing, the edited collection Queering Freedom: Music, Identity and Spirituality: Perspectives from Ten Countries and her autobiography Freedom Song: Faith, Abuse, Music and Spirituality: A Lived Experience.. She founded MSW – Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing – an international network sharing expertise and experience in this area. 
Dr Lila Moore, PhD is a lecturer, theorist, film-maker and mixed reality artist with expertise in the fields of screen-dance and Technoetic Arts. She holds a practice-based PhD from Middlesex University (2001) in the interdisciplinary context of Screen Dance, experimental film, modern art, performance, myth, ritual and expressive therapies. She also holds an MA in Independent Film and Video and MPhil on the evolution of performative and screen-based art forms from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, and a B.Ed. degree in Fine Art & Art History.
Altarpiece no. 1(1915) is one of three paintings entitled Altarpieces which are part of Hilma af Klint's series: Paintings for the Temple. The triangular structure and the colourful composition have symbolic, Theosophical meanings. The painting represents the balance between the spiritual and material aspects of the cosmos.
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