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UCLA Public Health Magazine: PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE ARTS (Coverage on HPM Students)

|An excerpt from UCLA PUBLIC HEALH Spring/Summer 2014 Magazine|

Jill Donnelly once made her living as a comedic actress and stage performer, with credits that include a CollegeHumor original short with actor Hugh Jackman (right inset). While pursuing her MPH at the Fielding School, she has continued to perform and teach comedy as a parallel career.

At first, Jill Donnelly figured she should hide her previous life.

Donnelly had made her living being funny – doing sketch and improvisational comedy on stage as a regular member of Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles, as well as performing for Funny or Die, CollegeHumor, and other online and TV outlets. Now she was an MPH student at the Fielding School, looking to develop skills that would enable her to address problems of access to care for vulnerable populations. And there was nothing funny about that.

Above: Three of Jill Donnelly’s Funny or Die comedy videos; “The Horse Who said ‘Hey,’” a parody on Annie Leibovitz and “The Steve Carrel’s Movie Poster Contract.”

Public health had always interested Donnelly – she even briefly worked as a Medicare patient advocate. But she loved to perform, and was good at it. Almost immediately upon moving to New York City after college, Donnelly was cast in a musical theater tour. After a few years of musicals she found comedy. “It was exciting to me because, particularly with improv and sketch, you could be creative and use your brain as well as your performance ability,” she explains. 

Donnelly moved to Los Angeles and continued to pursue comedy, but at some point it wasn’t enough. “People say to do what you love, and performing is my favorite thing in the world,” she says. “But the lifestyle – the unsteady income, the need for self-promotion, the lack of control over your own career path – made me unhappy.” Public health still held appeal, and with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, it seemed like an exciting time to make the change. So Donnelly enrolled at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

During her experience as an intern at L.A. Care Health Plan in the summer after her first year in the MPH program, Donnelly began to realize that her comedic and performing skills could be an asset in her new career. “I felt sort of sheepish about it, but the people at L.A. Care loved it,” she says. “I was focused, but I could also bring some levity and they valued that. Improv and sketch comedy are extremely team-driven. In public health, where you need to work well in teams, be flexible, and build off of other people’s ideas, that orientation is very useful.”

As an associate producer on films for patients with disabilities, Fielding School doctoral student Alina Palimaru seeks to convey complex medical topics in an accessible and compelling way to inform and empower patients.

Alina Palimaru never envisioned herself as a filmmaker, nor did she consider the possibility that an entertainment-oriented medium might serve as a vehicle through which she could make an impact on the public health issue that matters most to her.

Palimaru grew up in Romania and was an undergraduate studying history, politics and communications at Drexel University when she returned to her hometown for a visit during winter break, 2006. There she made plans to attend the opening of an art gallery with her friend Corina. It was to be Corina’s first outing in more than a year after being confined to a wheelchair following a car accident, and she was excited. But upon arrival, Corina was confronted with a flight of narrow steps up to the public reception. “The lack of the simplest of wheelchair accommodations ruined Corina’s evening and opened my eyes to my native country’s lack of consideration for the basic needs of disabled people,” Palimaru recalls. She expressed her outrage through an editorial in the local newspaper, but was disappointed by the lack of response.

After college, Palimaru held several public affairs positions in Washington, D.C., and started her own research firm before moving to London to continue working on policy research-oriented projects. But she never forgot about her friend’s disappointment, or about the many people in other countries who are marginalized by a lack of accommodation for their disabilities. In 2010, Palimaru met a film director who offered her the role of associate producer on “From Darkness into Light,” a film about coming to terms with a spinal cord injury. 

The film explains the nature of the injury, describes types of care, and provides patient insights and coping strategies. Neither a scripted story nor a documentary, it belongs to what Palimaru describes as an emerging genre called health care knowledge transfer – conveying complex medical topics in an accessible and compelling way to inform and empower patients and complement their face-to-face consultations with their physicians. 

The film was so well received by health care providers and patients alike that Palimaru decided she had found her niche. “For the first time in my career, I realized that my work could really move people,” Palimaru says. She went on to collaborate with the same director on other productions, including a comprehensive film on wheelchair provisions (vital to a user’s long-term wellbeing). She has also co-written a new film, currently in post-production, that explains the legal rights of disabled people in the UK. 

Palimaru is now a student in the Fielding School’s PhD program, where she is working on a film in the same genre with Dr. Frederick Zimmerman, professor and chair of the school’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “Knowledge Is the Start,” the short film’s working title, will introduce the school’s Center for Health Advancement to a wide audience of Los Angeles-area stakeholders as it emphasizes the importance of the center’s research in effecting change in the city’s future health.

“There is a tendency among some experts to look down upon the use of an entertainment medium for serious health issues,” Palimaru says. “But I came to realize that when you have carefully crafted and vetted content, with clever use of graphics, animation and live-action footage, it can be a very effective health education tool. Public health research findings are communicated mostly in the realm of academic journals. An academic foundation is important, but it can also be extremely beneficial to reach a larger lay audience in a more creative way.”

READ THE FULL ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE.