Soul Paint

Soul Paint is a multi award winning immersive world that blends art and science to inspire personal introspection and universal connection. Created by directors Sarah Ticho and Niki Smit, with narration by NAACP Image Award winning actor Rosario Dawson, the experience has been co-created with behavioral scientists, patients and health care researchers. It combines three dimensional drawing, playful avatar interaction, video game style inputs, and explorations of shared interior worlds. As you move between the physical and virtual realms, your creations unfold as living, expressive forms that are playful, intimate, and uniquely yours. Alongside this personal journey, you are invited to encounter the stories of fellow New Yorkers, forming a shared interior world that connects individual experience to collective feeling. These contributions emerge as an evolving collective portrait of how the city feels today. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and artistic healthcare practices such as body mapping, Soul Paint is designed to travel across galleries, theatres, hospitals, classrooms, and public spaces. It is part artwork, part living research, and part tool for care, reimagining wellbeing as embodied, creative, and shared.