About DAHF
Delhi Arts and Health Festival (DAHF) is a community-led festival that brings together diverse practices, people and perspectives at the intersection of arts and health.
Across five days, it creates spaces to experience, explore and reflect on how creativity and arts can shape individual, community and collective care.
Our Vision
To nurture a future where arts and creativity are recognised, valued, and integrated as essential to health, healing, and human wellbeing.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create opportunities for artists, healthcare professionals, researchers, educators, policymakers, cultural practitioners, and communities to come together across disciplines, share knowledge, and explore how arts and creativity can enrich health and wellbeing.
Through collaboration, public engagement, and creative exchange, we seek to strengthen the arts and health ecosystem and inspire more compassionate, connected, and inclusive approaches to care and community wellbeing.
Why Now
900+ studies reviewed by the World Health Organization, pointing to the role of the arts in improving mental and physical health.
Social prescribing clinicians referring patients to arts and community activities is now embedded in NHS England and practised in more than 30 countries.
India's National Health Policy 2017 emphasises preventive and promotive health and the mainstreaming of traditional practices such as Yoga and AYUSH, recognising culture and community as part of how people stay well.
In India, 1 in 7 Indians lives with a mental health concern (NIMHANS, 2023).
Why Delhi
A city shaped by migration, memory, culture and constant change, Delhi brings together diverse communities, creative practices and a rich healthcare ecosystem. It offers a powerful setting to explore what arts and health can mean in a contemporary Indian city.
India has long recognised the relationship between creativity, community and healing. Our art forms, rituals, crafts and collective practices have supported people through joy, grief, celebration, healing and change across generations.
DAHF builds on this indigenous knowledge while bringing it into conversation with contemporary health and mental health practice. The festival brings practitioners, communities and individuals together to experience, explore and expand the role of the arts in health, healing and wellbeing.
What We Hope to Achieve
Stronger collaboration between arts, health, education and community sectors
Greater integration of creative practice within healthcare and community wellbeing settings
Increased visibility and opportunities for artists working in care and social impact
More research, documentation and evidence emerging from India
Stronger national and international collaborations across the Global South
A growing public understanding that creativity is fundamental to health, wellbeing and collective care
