Team

Helen leads the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence. An inter/transdisciplinary artist-researcher, Helen makes installations, interactions, and interventions. She creates and curates exhibitions, and designs environments and performances (theatre, dance, digital, live art). More on her art, research and consulting available at helenyung.com.

For over a decade, Helen has contributed to civic actions and cultural policy thinking at the municipal, provincial, national, and international levels. She is a published researcher, and consults on projects for public and private funders, community organizations, and others. Much of this is institution-adjacent work, which is good or bad depending on how you feel about neighbours.

In her work with newcomers to Canada, Helen plays with and corrupts conventional approaches to settlement, by leading with what art knows, or looking at what art has to offer immigration. Blending performance, conceptual art, and social R&D, she has successfully helped newcomers who have experienced difficulties getting a job in Canada become employed fulltime in their field of interest. Funders love it, but say they don’t know how to fund this work.

These days, Helen is preoccupied with the question of What Art Knows, which is the title of a book she is writing about the role of artists and artistic intelligence in contemporary society. She created The Imagination Audit to help government, social organizations, and other leaders in civil society to approach innovation and social change with more imagination and creative wisdom.

Helen was formerly with the Culture of Cities Centre, a Salzburg Global Fellow, and a board member for Social Innovation Canada and the Centre for Social Innovation.