In this episode of Art &, we speak with artist, storyteller, and Stanford alum Janani Balasubramanian and Dr. Karleen Giannitrapani, Assistant Professor of Medicine in Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford Medicine, whose research focuses on palliative care, serious illness, and supporting people through major life transitions. Together, they discuss the origins of Forever Lab, a new initiative at Stanford Medicine that brings artists, scientists, technologists, and caregivers together to address some of life's most profound transitions.
Born from a chance encounter during Janani's Denning Visiting Artist residency, Forever Lab explores how artistic practice can contribute to healthcare innovation, creating new interventions, experiences, and systems that support people through moments of vulnerability. Janani and Karleen discuss building interdisciplinary collaborations, why caregiving is a creative act, and how beauty can help reshape the future of healthcare interventions. Along the way, they reflect on the value of discomfort, the power of "curating" people across disciplines, and what becomes possible when artists are invited to participate in solving society's most complex challenges.
Featured Guests: Janani Balasubramanian & Dr. Karleen Giannitrapani
Follow Stanford Arts on Instagram and YouTube for more stories and updates.
To learn more about Forever Lab: https://www.foreverlab.org/
Host: Ellen Oh
Creator / Producer / Editor: Taylor Jones
Sound Designer & Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme Song & Music: Juana Izuzquiza
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko
Hi! I'm Ellen Oh, Director of Interdisciplinary Arts Programs at Stanford and host of Art &, where we explore how artists and researchers are shaping new ways of seeing the world.
Today, I'm joined by Janani Balasubramanian and Dr. Karleen Giannitrapani. Janani is an artist and alumni whose work moves across immersive experience, storytelling, and science. At Stanford, Janani was a former Denning visiting artist and is now connected with Stanford Medicine through Forever Lab.
Karleen is an assistant professor of medicine in primary care and population health, with a focus on palliative care, serious illness, and how these systems support people through major life changes.
Together, they founded Forever Lab, an ambitious Stanford Medicine venture that unites artists and scientists to develop new methods and systems addressing illness, loss and grief, the threshold moments that shape our lives.
In our conversation, we talk about collaboration, what it means to build structures for artists to innovate in sectors like healthcare, and how art and beauty can transform our approaches to caregiving.
Here's Janani and Karleen.
Ellen Oh: So let's start with how the two of you met, because you both came from pretty different worlds, contemporary art and medicine. I think you met when Janani was a Denning visiting artist in 2024.
Janani: Yeah, Karleen and I met when I was a Denning visiting artist. There was a moment in that residency period where I was getting curious about an existing artwork that I had co-created with a colleague in astrophysics, actually. And I was interested in bringing it into spaces of health care and medicine. I remember Carl telling me actually to meet someone named Karleen Giannitropany and both of us being people with long last names, Karleen, I could not parse out from what Carl said. What was your first name and what was your last name? So I think for the first several weeks before I was meant to kind of meet you, I had some gobbledygook scribbled down in my notebook. I'm supposed to meet this person named Carl Ian Giannitropany. And I think my invitation to you was, hey, I want you to come see this artwork and experience it with me and think about where it could be situated within healthcare. And I remember we met along with one of the students that we now work with together, actually. But we met in the Electrical Engineering Building, which was a very plain context, actually, neither an art nor medicine context. Very, you know, high fluorescent lighting. And I invited you in to see this artwork. That's the moment when things started clicking. I wonder if you want to pick up and talk about your experience of that first encounter.
Karleen: Yeah, I think I showed up to this meeting because of a recommendation. Somebody's like, you have to meet this person. And that happens often. And sometimes you meet people and you meet them once and it's brilliant and that's what it was supposed to be. But we met and I got to experience this art piece that you made and I had this kind of interesting click in my mind, I was like, well, we actually need sources of innovation like this in healthcare. So much of innovation, I feel like happens at the intersection of disciplines. And I feel like the project that I saw that you had made was called The Gift. And it was something that you had presented at Stanford before and in various different contexts, but I saw it as just an experience in one setting and it was done for me and the student. And I was like, well, isn't this something that's so bite-sized and so small? And if we reduce it down to its tiniest little bits, couldn't we bring this to the bedside?t
Janani: My recollection of what happened after is, Karleen, you kept coming to me with sort of yes and questions, really questions of like, okay, yes, we're working on this. Are you also interested in developing this other project with me? Are you also interested in exploring this area of inquiry? And I was very intrigued. Yeah, I did. I was like, this is a type of person that I really vibe with, get along with like people who are, one, excited to collaborate and excited to do things that, you know, neither of us can do by ourselves. To Karleen's point, I think I get frustrated sometimes with the conversations that we have within fields that are framed around lack, that are framed around, okay, what does our field not do well, our field's not good at, you know, within the arts world, we have consistent conversations about, hey, we're not reaching large swaths of the population of this country because of the way that many of our institutions are structured. But instead of thinking about it as a lack, what if we frame the question around, okay, but which fields and sectors and people and disciplines are doing that well? How do we collaborate with them? How do we reach across those boundaries and bring what could be understood as lack rather into a conversation and a frame around interdependence. And I think interdependence is actually how I approach the question of interdisciplinarity, that in order to succeed in the ways that we really want to succeed, it's not about us succeeding as disciplines, but about us succeeding as people. And in order to do that, we need each other. We need the capacities that each of our fields and practitioners have cultivated.
Ellen Oh: So then at what point did you realize that you needed an actual structure and wanted to build a lab together? Can you explain why you decided to name it Forever Lab? And how would you describe it to someone encountering it for the first time?
Janani: We realized that in, I think, two ways. One was we have a good working relationship. We have a good set of colleagues and kind of team members around us. So one, it was like, yes, we have the circumstances in place and the people in place. I think the other realization was in order to do the kinds of things that we were aiming to do, which is to bring artists, scientists, technologists, other kinds of people into sustained collaborative practice. around interesting problems in healthcare and human life. There is not kind of a copy-paste structure that exists somewhere else that we could simply plug into, that this was a space that we had to authentically cultivate ourselves that is, I think, rooted in a both place-based, like Bay Area-based and national and international movement of people who have practiced at these intersections and needs to kind of authentically respond to both our expertise, our interests, and the contemporary needs of these spaces?
Karleen: I think we needed a space we could invite people into, as opposed to responding to other people's invitations. For the first couple months, we really made an effort to reach out. We went to Rutgers, we went to New York. We met with many of the other amazing people working at this intersection of art and health. We have collaborators in Europe, we have collaborators in Canada. And I think that's where we started to get the feeling of there is something different that we can uniquely do. I think also because we're positioned in the Silicon Valley. And so in our personal networks, we're also having conversations with art, health, and technology.
Janani: We knew it needed to be a lab because fundamentally what we are engaged in is research and experimentation. Then we were looking for, okay, we need a word, we need a framework that didn't feel like it was only rooted in academic jargon, that took up space, that was really articulating, okay, what is the purview of problems that we are looking at and dealing with? They're problems that have endured across time, across the entire human journey, across the existence of, you know, our species on this planet. And there's a little cheeky nod to impermanence in there, right? Like, because one of our big domains that we work on is around loss, around the fact that we contend with the impermanence of our own lives and the impermanence of, you know, our loved ones, of aspects of our lives. So, you know, to us, one thing that is forever is change. I think of the sci-fi writer Octavia Butler calling out God is change, that this is what we know to be true. And so that is what the forever in Forever Lab is carrying.
Ellen: Let's jump into some of your initial initiatives in the lab. So Forever Lab says that creation translates inquiry into form. So you do that through artwork, technologies, and care interventions. What are some of the actual forms that this work is taking right now
Janani: So we knew pretty early on that caregiving and particularly with the framework of caregiving across the full human lifespan was a domain that we wanted to do work in when we say caregiving across the lifespan what we mean is we really understand caregiving and care receiving as essential functions that we do across our entire lives from the moment we are children to the point that you know we may be taking care of our parents or someone may be taking care of us when we are disabled and or elderly um and to think of the whole human journey as a process of actually preparing for and cultivating those muscles of caregiving and care receiving.
So what we built and launched very recently is a fellowship container which enacts one of my personal dreams honestly for a fellowship where instead of saying artists are doing their own fellowship over here, or the scientists are doing their own fellowship over here, we said, “No, let's bring practitioners who are skilled and interesting and passionate about this area, regardless of what field they're coming from, together in one fellowship space.”
So we launched the Atlas Fellowship. The reason that we named it Atlas is we wanted to, you know, honor the sometimes invisible or under-recognized caregiving labor that holds up the world just as the kind of Greek mythological figure Atlas shoulders like holds up the world and we wanted to hone in on this kind of cultivation of navigational tools. Like, how can we support building of new navigational tools, for the increasing… because of all kinds of demographic shifts, and ever-changing, because of all kinds of technological and other shifts, landscape of caregiving.
So we have kind of three, an initial cohort of three fellowship teams. One is our colleague Thao Ha, who's a psychologist who's working on the science of teen love and understanding teen love as a space where you actually build through discomfort, through friction, through heartbreak, through talking to your friends, those early muscles of how you give and receive care.
We have Cameron Russell and Mei Tao who through this project the art of care have really been uplifting the creative work of caregivers which often does not leave the space of the home the kind of domestic space as the space where that art is displayed and they're doing that work of bridging that with other kinds of spaces in society and public life.
And then finally Flaco Jimenez, who's an artist, performer, director, skilled community practitioner who cultivated this immense body of both experiential and immersive work and work intended to be interacted with and delivered for people with dementia and their caregivers to mediate healing, to mediate new interactions between those people as they go through that caregiver journey.
The goal of that fellowship is really to help these teams through, you know, whatever resources we can help bring to the table. The teams that we can embed them in more broadly from kind of other networks to bring those projects into the next significant step. To do that kind of deep thinking work, continue to uphold the integrity of the work we've already called and come to some next step.
We just had a convening called Designing Forever Caregiving that included these fellows, but as well as other practitioners coming from across caregiving advocacy, entertainment, art, technology, robotics, and medicine, assembling around this question of like how do we better support caregivers across the lifespan? Because as a lab, that is where we are rooted in the kind of research and experimentation work. So that's Atlas. That's what we're dreaming up in that space.
Ellen Oh: That's a really exciting initiative and undertaking and sounds like you're really looking at moments across the human lifespan where caregiving is really necessary. But Karleen, how do these projects then translate into clinical care or the health care space?
Karleen: Well, I think that they're co-created and it's actually part of one conversation. So it's not that art is on the side and it'll come into medicine later. So Janani was talking about the Designing Forever convening. We had people represented from all the different fields of medicine across the lifespan, pediatrics, geriatrics, palliative care, emergency medicine, together in conversation with leaders from nonprofit institutions, people responsible for making funding decisions. And so patients, caregivers, people with lived experience. And the question becomes, how might we design things from their very initial starting point that are built in service to patients or caregivers as they're walking through the various different paths?
Something that I really walked away from that convening with is that sometimes you just have to create the container in which to have the conversation. So many conversations occurred that will have so many lives beyond what we even originated. I already know of future collaborations that came out of this act of convening. And so it really left me centering this idea that curation, which is, I think, another like very specific artistic lens skill point, but curation is an act of supporting teaming because it gives a shared mental scaffold for people to come together around a common purpose and then move forward to a future thing.
Around caregiving specifically. I mean, I should say I also had a baby a couple of years ago and I learned so much through that transformational experience, both things I didn't know before because I was exposed to a whole new way of being. But there were things that were scaffolded for me, like you need this type of stroller or you need these types of resources. And, you know, having worked in this professional space of palliative care and geriatrics, I was like, why is the end of life moment having so much less preparation and resources that aren't beautiful?
And what if we could realize there are very few things that are inevitable, but birth and death are two of them. And what if we built beauty and awe and meaning and preparation into this moment as people face inevitable decline. And where are we going to get those sources of innovation from?
I think that's something that artists in the art world can uniquely help us with.
(music)
Ellen Oh: So you met when Janani presented The Gift at the Hospital, which was… an immersive reading and audio experience about grief and healing on a cosmic scale. Karleen, as you and Janani were starting to collaborate, did you immediately see how this could be a viable intervention in healthcare?
Karleen: So, we met and started working and became a lab around, you are an artist, you have a product. I saw a fundamental use case for it in a very specific context in healthcare delivery. And so we brought it as a pilot first to the bedside in palliative care services. But then, you know, through the experience of the doctors and chaplains delivering this art intervention and seeing the conversations and the transformation it was able to support them with, then they asked, OK, can we deliver this as a workforce intervention? Because, you know, doctors are people too. And chaplains also face existential strain and need support when they're supporting people with grief, pain, loss. And so we then explored taking this same artistic intervention, but repackaging it and delivering it in a way that it could be brought instead of a patient or a caregiver, a healthcare worker who is also facing a moment of need. And there are so few interventions that actually support people who are workers in these difficult contexts. We saw this a lot during COVID. We saw people, healthcare workers, facing the need for support to be able to sustain themselves and do their work. But there weren't easy built-in things to refer them to.
When we talk about it in the context of... mortality, I think… was our initial starting place. But there are so many moments in healthcare or medicine or healthcare delivery where the patient experience is one of loss and then therefore the need for transition. And so one example that I might highlight, of that, is something like turnover. So we have workforce shortages. We have sometimes, not enough physicians or nurses. This is even worse when you think about rural areas, which is a lot of the United States. And so patients face losing a doctor often and when you think about what that happens they have to navigate a whole new system they have to have the self-efficacy to say I'm going to show up and coordinate getting this extra scan I'm going to get a new provider I'm going to talk to my insurance company and get this new extra resources and sometimes those burdens are so high that people wind up falling through the cracks. So there's a big transformation that has to occur when a patient loses their existing healthcare infrastructure.
Ellen Oh: So we’re using the word 'intervention' a lot in this conversation. What does that mean?
Karleen: So an example of where innovation would be needed is, well, “Okay, what would it look like to have a patient or caregiver facing a tool support system intervention moment of something helpful, right?” That's what a healthcare intervention is, something helpful to support patients in this moment of PCP loss, primary care provider loss. It's a new idea, I think, to say, well, actually, this is a patient moment of vulnerability. We need an intervention to support patients in this moment of vulnerability. But that's an example where the solution needs to come from outside medicine, because the problem and where the support is occurring is actually in the community. It's outside of the healthcare infrastructure. What we really need is the community and the museums and the other places people might be to be saying, "Okay, so you faced losing a provider. Here's a way," because you're now outside of the system, "to get back into a system."
Ellen Oh: So, although you both had a natural chemistry and ease in starting out, I’m wondering how you navigate any tensions from your different approaches?
Janani: I feel like this is also a question listeners may have. Like, okay, you bring these people together. “Where are the tension points? Where are the friction points?” Beyond kind of an interdependence lens I think the other way to really look at interdisciplinary work is a kind of cross-cultural work we explore this deliberately in Undisciplined as a book project like when you and when you do cross-cultural work there are going to be friction points and breakdowns that are associated with cultural norms and vernacular jargon that exists within any given field. So a lot of it is work of translation, being in conversation, trying to bridge across those divides. I think one sentence or question that I find myself saying to KarleerSometimes if, and without doing that work, that is where the kind of what could be remediable friction points become kind of insurmountable. If you're not attending to like, what is, what are you actually saying? What are you actually trying to articulate to me?
Ellen Oh: It feels like that's a really important first step. I mean, because there is different jargon in different fields and you are merging all of these people who really speak different languages. How do you make that translation possible across all of those fields?
Janani: I think some things I try to keep in mind is that the goal is not merger, actually. Like, friction, discomfort, and tension are good. Productive conflict is good. Like being in disagreement, this is a healthy part of an innovation research experimentation process. And if that's not happening, frankly, then we are not at the edges of something. We are in the space of the comfortable and familiar, and that's not where we want to be. From like, how do you bridge that perspective? Some, I think, strategies that are helpful are play, are humor, are games, like getting people out of their hour, really, seriousness that we can, you know, kind of comfortably sit in within any particular field. Strategies like play and creation help us shed that mask for a moment and say like, okay, now, what are we actually trying to do?
Ellen Oh: Janani, you often talk about artists as being contributors to systems innovation in addition to culture. What do you think artists can bring into spaces like health or technology that's currently undervalued or under-realized?
Janani: Yeah I think picking up your questions in reverse actually. So Arts and Discipline is a book that I co-wrote with a longtime collaborator, Natalie Gosnell from physics. And we really wanted to generate both a methodological guide to, you know, how do artists and scientists work at this interface between and beyond our disciplines and also a vision for where this could go, where those, the kind of end products of art science collaboration are not esoteric contributions that are only legible to a few people around us but go on to really have impact and importance to some of these bigger questions that human beings that larger sectors are contending with, healthcare and public health among them. It's been exciting within Forever Lab to actually bring the methodology that we articulated from my own practice and also the practice of many other artists and scientists we were in conversation with.
You are also cited in the book, Ellen, about how to do this work well and in authentic kind of values based collaboration, bringing those methodologies into the kind of daily space of ForeverLab to have a container to enact those things.
What I mean by, you know, artists being contributors to systems innovation and in addition to kind of art and culture and art and culture spaces is related to my earlier contribution around interdisciplinarity as a kind of interdependence. Because I see very clearly as someone… you know, I have always lived at the interface between many fields. I see my colleagues in medicine and technology and other fields asking questions that I know, there's not enough spaces where we're encountering one another for more than brief glimpses, for those practices, those insights, those strategies to be brought from, you know, arts into these other sectors. And I would argue also the opposite is true.
Like the kinds of inquiry and practice that artists need to respond appropriately to this age of massive biological and technological change, those are also not gonna come within the art world alone. That is why these practices of kind of artist science technology collaboration are continuing to grow and accelerate.
Ellen Oh: So I think not only are measurements important in a healthcare setting, but thinking about evaluating outcomes and impacts, it's also important on the art side for arts institutions to understand the impact of art on well-being and people's health. Have you thought about it in that context?
Janani: Yeah, we have some discrete work underway that is, you know, synthesizing existing literature, seeing what gaps there are, what work needs to be done to understand art-impacts on, you know, metrics related to things like healthy aging or well-being.
I am also interested in, you know, under the same theme of like reversing flow of knowledge is looking inside, like what are art institutions and kind of the arts apparatus in this country more broadly doing to uplift the health and well-being of artists and arts workers.
As a workforce that is often living in incredible precarity, I'm really interested in how we can uplift the health and sustainability of artists so that we can continue to make important contributions to society and health and other sectors.
Karleen: I can say it's such a privilege to work with artists who really have this expert capacity in improv and spontaneity. There are ways that this unique skill set, if brought into an innovation infrastructure, can really support design work such that we are bringing in voices and perspectives from all the various sources that they come from and facilitating the participants to do something new.
I mean, healthcare historically is a very hierarchical industry. And so tools or people or roles that can help break down some of that hierarchy between provider and patient or between nurses and doctors or whatever the groups that you need to bring together to solve, you know, changing a workflow or building a new intervention or having a consult to a service happen at a different time point in a patient's care trajectory. These are all things that if we can sometimes step back, look at a little bit differently, maybe we would do something differently. But facilitating bringing those people together into a conversation, I think, is not always easy, which makes it exciting to bring in somebody from a little bit outside the hierarchy.
Ellen Oh: So if Forever Lab succeeds at the scale that you imagine in the future, what changes culturally?
Janani: I think people, writ large, in the spaces where we're able to bring new ideas, technologies, artworks, interventions, are better prepared and able to navigate moments of rupture, loss in their lives. And on a maybe, you know, different, less practical, but very important level to me, there is more beauty in these moments of human vulnerability.
Ellen Oh: So finally, if you had to leave listeners with one idea about what Forever Lab is trying to make possible, what would that be?
Karleen: I would like to see the interventions within healthcare center beauty. I would like to see, you know, caregivers offered something more than an ugly PDF handout. I feel like if we center the idea of what makes their experience as they're going through something difficult, more beautiful, we iterate just a tiny bit further. And so, yeah, if our contribution is a tiny bit more beauty on every little person's experience, to me, I feel like that's a big contribution to talking about improving quality of care and health care delivery as a whole.
Ellen Oh: It is. And I believe the two of you can make that happen. Well, good luck with all of the initiatives that you are undertaking this year. I think Forever Lab is a really important new space and structure for this new kind of work to happen.
Janani: Thanks, Ellen.
Karleen: Thanks for having us.
Janani: I also want to say a specific thank you, you can leave this in the edit or not, that the space you hold at the university in making interdisciplinary encounter between arts and other spaces possible is an essential role that is actually the reason that Karleen and I even met and are able to do this work. So thank you to you.
Ellen Oh: Thank you.
If you want to dive deeper? You can visit foreverlab.org to follow the lab’s research and other initiatives in art and science co-creation.
You can also check out Janani’s new book Art-Science Undisciplined, co-written with Colorado College astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell. In the book, they describe their journey as collaborators and offer a playbook for artists and researchers alike.
That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.