Mindful Arts

Sherre’s Practice-led PhD research examines ways mindfulness can help artists and others tolerate and even thrive in uncertainty.

She shares the benefits of mindfulness through her arts practice, teaching, and consulting.

In artmaking, she’s interested in developing projects that use mindfulness to connect art and health—projects such as The Listening Room.

She’s provided mindfulness consultancy for organisations including University of New South Wales’ felt Experience & Empathy Lab—where psychologists and art specialists collaborate to develop mental health interventions that can be provided outside the health sector.

She teaches mindfulness at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse cancer treatment and research hospital and she’s developed mindful leadership workshops and courses for future human centred design leaders at RMIT University. She’s also been instrumental in co-developing and teaching courses that explore dynamic relationships between dharma practice and art practice for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Barre, MA.

In 2015 she was awarded a Hemera Foundation six month Tending Space Fellowship for Artists—to explore the intersection of art and dharma practices.

She participates in regular vipassana meditation retreats in the US, Australia, and Asia. She’s been fortunate to study and train with eminent dharma and meditation teachers including Joseph Goldstein, Steven Smith, Stephen and Martine Batchelor, Gregory Kramer and Melissa Blacker, and with secular mindfulness meditation teachers John Kabat-Zinn, Saki Santorelli, Florence Meleo-Myer, and Bob Stahl.

She became Qualified to teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction in 2012 by the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, UMass Medical School, and she has also undertaken Compassion Cultivation Training at The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University School of Medicine.

She’s made two documentary series on mindfulness for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and is a former Board Director of Metta Programs, a global community sharing the benefits of relational Dhamma and meditation practices worldwide.

— Marius Foley, Program Manager, Master of Design Futures / Studio Lead, Design Leadership. RMIT University.

“I’ve worked with Sherre DeLys on a few innovative projects, such as the development of ABC Pool – a ‘predictive project’ at the national broadcaster, and more recently when Sherre introduced Mindfulness into the Future Design Leadership course at RMIT.

In each case Sherre brings her multi-dimensional perspective to the work. This includes her media-making intelligence (from creative insights to storytelling in media); a curiosity into how people work, and how we might work together in more interesting ways; and her practice of mindfulness // creativity // leadership.

Sherre exemplifies mindful leadership in a very human and contemporary way.”