Spirituality and the Arts Special Interest Group (SASIG)
Chairs: Rev. Prof. June Boyce-Tillman MBE, Dr Lila Moore PhD, Annalisa Burello MSc (bios below)
| In recent years there has been a growing interest in the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This special interest group will meet to discuss this intersection in a variety of forms and mediums such as visual art, music, film, dance, digital, interactive, poetry, time-based and performative art forms. This will include the personal, social and cultural, encompassing both the religious and the spiritual-but-not-religious context. |
The group aims to explore a variety of relationships between the arts and spirituality. These are some possibilities:
Our approach aims to be interdisciplinary, so we will explore the juncture of the arts and spirituality through the lenses of consciousness studies, spirituality studies, religious studies, theology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, health/wellbeing, philosophy, art, aesthetics and literary theories, musicology; and through the lens of different agents: artists, curators, therapists, academics and independent scholars, general public, popular initiatives, etc.
Aims of the SASIG:
To become involved in the SASIG, please register for our next event.
All SIG meetings will be free for INSS members. Non-members are welcome to attend the inaugural event for free and subsequent ones for a small fee. If you enjoy it, please consider joining INSS. Besides other benefits, this will allow you to view the INSS-members-only SASIG page containing profiles of other attendees (if shared), and give you free access to all INSS SIG events.
Our email address is mailto:sasig@spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org
We now have a Youtube channel where you can watch the recordings of our Zoom meetings.
We also created a Facebook group: please join it!
![]() Annalisa Burello completed a Master's Degree in Financial and Monetary Economics at Bocconi University in 1993 which led to a fifteen years career in finance and banking. After leaving banking in 2008, she resurrected her childhood passion for the arts and retrained as a visual artist, attaining a BA (Hon) Photography at the University of Westminster in 2019. Currently, she is completing a Master's degree in Anthropology - Religion in the Contemporary World at the London School of Economics. Annalisa is researching the intersection between art, creativity and spirituality and, following her introduction to McGilchrist's Hemispheric Hypothesis, in empirically exploring how spiritual and creative practices affect the Right Hemisphere and mental health in general. These investigations have brought her to inquire and later adopt meditation and yoga as a body-mind practice to access, release and sustain creative energies via supporting a greater integration of the right and left hemispheric modes of functioning. Her goal is to articulate a framework of spirituality to include artistic practices. Annalisa lives in London and has two children. |
She is a hymn writer with a collection published by Stainer and Bell of inclusive language and ecological hymns – A Rainbow to Heaven. These are used internationally. She is an Anglican priest serving All Saints Church, Tooting. https://www.impulse-music.co.uk/juneboyce-tillman/ |
Lila lectures and writes on the arts, film, and new media in the context of modern and contemporary spirituality, mysticism, gender, cultural theories, and technoetics. She is a lecturer and thesis supervisor for the Alef Trust MSc Programme in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology, and leading the course: Psyche, Cosmos and the Imaginal. Additionally, she has been a lecturer at the Department for the Study of Mysticism and Spirituality at Zefat Academic College in the ancient Kabbalistic town of Safed (2013-2022), teaching BA courses on spiritual cinema and the intersection of spirituality, mysticism and the arts. Her postdoc at the Planetary Collegium of Plymouth University (2015) entitled The Cybernetic Futures Institute is a networked platform, exploring technoetic arts with an emphasis on the spiritual-mystical and occult in art, film, screen-dance, and networked-digital-interactive forms of performance and narrative. Lila regularly presents research papers in academic conferences, and her articles were published in academic journals. She is a member of the editorial board of Consciousness, Spirituality & Transpersonal Psychology journal and the S/He International Journal of Goddess Studies. Lila participates in juried exhibitions and festivals and her digital artworks, films and theoretical writings are archived by Bloomsbury Digital, ACM SIGGRAPH and ADA - Archive of Digital Art. |