2–6 December 2026 · Delhi, India
Delhi ARTS & Health Festival.
Reimagining Delhi as the Capital of Care
A week-long city-wide initiative where creativity and care meet. Across the city, artists, practitioners and communities come together to explore how the arts help us heal, connect and flourish.
Connection · Art Therapy · Music Therapy · Movement · Dance · Storytelling · Visual Arts · Community · Poetry · Indigenous Arts · Craft · Breathwork · Theatre · Meditation · Creative Writing · Creativity · Expression · Drum Circles · Folk Arts · Cultural Arts · Connection · Art Therapy · Music Therapy · Movement · Dance · Storytelling · Visual Arts · Community · Poetry · Indigenous Arts · Craft · Breathwork · Theatre · Meditation · Creative Writing · Creativity · Expression · Drum Circles · Folk Arts · Cultural Arts ·
Five Days. One City. A Shared Conversation.
5
Days
2–6 December 2026
150+
Experiences
Performances, workshops, talks & installations
100+
Artists, Facilitators & Speakers
From Delhi, India and across the world
20+
Venues Across Delhi
Hospitals, galleries, parks, universities & more
10,000+
Participants
Community members, clinicians, artists & students
All figures are indicative, subject to final confirmation.
Experience the transformative power of art in promoting health and well-being.
Festival Experience Pathways
The festival offers many ways to engage
Whether you’re looking to learn, create, reflect, connect, or celebrate, you can explore experiences that unfold at your own pace and in your own way. Every participant shapes their own festival experience. Move between moments of reflection and celebration, hands-on creative practice and thought-provoking conversations, personal exploration and shared community experiences.
01
Reflect
Panels · Talks · Conversations · Roundtables · Research Exchanges
02
Immerse
Workshops · Movement Practices · Expressive Arts · Creative Exploration · Participatory Experiences · Skill-Building Sessions
03
Discover
Exhibitions · Installations · Public Art · Storytelling Projects · Interactive Spaces
04
Energise
Performances · Music · Theatre · Dance · Community Celebrations · Collective Experiences
05
Refresh
Community Spaces · Wellbeing Zones · Resource Hubs · Marketplaces · Opportunities to Pause, Connect and Recharge
The Field
What is Arts & Health?
Arts and health is a growing global field that recognises the power of creative and cultural practices to improve wellbeing, support recovery, and strengthen communities. It brings artists, clinicians, researchers and citizens together around a shared belief: that care is not only clinical, but creative.
From dance in hospital wards to music in mental health settings, evidence increasingly shows that the arts play a vital role in how we heal, connect and thrive across the whole span of a life.
What the evidence shows:
- A WHO review of evidence from over 3,000 studies found the arts help prevent illness, promote health and support treatment across every stage of life. — Fancourt & Finn, WHO, 2019
- Adults over 50 who engaged with the arts frequently had a 31% lower risk of early death across a 14-year study. — Fancourt & Steptoe, BMJ, 2019
- Mothers with postnatal depression who joined 10 weeks of group singing recovered faster than those receiving usual care. — Fancourt & Perkins, Br J Psychiatry, 2018
- Regular engagement in music, singing and theatre was linked to a 27% lower risk of cancer-related death. — HUNT Study, Norway, 2020
When creativity meets care,
communities are transformed.
The Foundation
Why Arts, Health and Community?
Creativity
The Human Instinct
Creativity is one of the oldest forms of human expression. It helps us process, imagine and make meaning from experience.
In the context of health, creativity becomes a tool for reflection, resilience and repair.
Care
Beyond the Clinical
Care is more than treatment. It is attention, dignity and connection, the felt sense of being seen and held.
The arts expand what care can look like, reaching people where clinical systems alone cannot.
Community
Health Is Collective
We do not heal in isolation. Belonging, participation and shared experience are foundational to wellbeing.
The festival treats community as both the context and the outcome of care.
The City
Why Delhi?
Delhi is a city shaped by memory, migration, diversity, resilience and reinvention; a metropolis of thirty-five million people that holds within it the full complexity of modern India. DAHF does not take place in Delhi. It takes place with Delhi.The unique density of cultural institutions, healthcare infrastructure, policy architecture, and living artistic tradition in a single metropolitan geography.
Art in Delhi lives beyond the auditoriums, galleries, or curated spaces. It lives in the rhythm of protest chants, in murals across city walls and forgotten corners, in stories held within heritage sites and old monuments, in street theatre unfolding at crossings, in conversations over chai and Delhi chaat, in movement, ritual, and everyday expression.
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Cultural Density
From classical Kathak to contemporary performance, Delhi holds one of the world’s most layered artistic ecosystems: Mughal, colonial, modern and emergent in constant dialogue.
✚
Healthcare Infrastructure
Home to AIIMS, hundreds of public hospitals, and a growing network of community health initiatives, Delhi is a living laboratory for health systems reform.
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Policy & Systems Influence
As India’s capital, Delhi is where decisions about health, culture and education are made. DAHF positions itself as a partner to that policy conversation.
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Global Connections
Delhi’s diplomatic, academic and cultural networks connect it to every major city on earth. The festival is designed to bring Delhi’s insights to the world and the world’s practices to Delhi.
Delhi as Collaborator
DAHF is conceived as a partnership with the city. The festival works with Delhi’s artists, clinicians, communities, institutions and policymakers to co-create something that could only happen here. Delhi’s complexity is not a challenge to manage but the creative enlivenment we value.
A Festival Rooted in Place
Every venue, every artist, every community partner is chosen because of their relationship to this city and its people. The festival moves across Delhi, from cultural hubs to hospitals, from universities to parks; because care, like culture, belongs everywhere.
Where creativity meets care.
Join us in celebrating arts and health.
Delhi Arts and Health Festival 