The 7th Annual International Symposium for the Arts in Palliative Care

“Encountering the arts in life, death and grief.” – This international symposium has become an annual landmark event for the arts in palliative care. It brings together arts therapists, socially engaged arts practitioners, community artists, arts and health professionals as well as researchers, policy makers and community partners with a commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration.

Friday 20th November 2026: 9.30 – 17.00 UK time: Hybrid event (in-person and online)

Organised by St Columba’s Hospice Care in collaboration with Queen Margaret University. Kindly sponsored by Barcelona Publishers.

This year’s symposium focuses on “Encountering the arts in life, death and grief”. Embracing the diversity that characterises the arts in palliative care (see Tsiris & Lee, 2025), we seek to promote dialogue and exchange across different professional, social and cultural contexts. Through presentations, creative workshops, panel discussions and project examples, we will explore how our creative encounters with the arts can shape our experiences of death, loss and change.

The arts —including music, drama, painting, sculpture, creative writing and film making—can offer a creative space for making sense of our living, dying and grieving. The arts act as a catalyst and container for expressing and processing intense emotions. They also offer powerful means not only for creating legacies but also for generating safe spaces for open conversations about death and dying in society.

Programme and abstracts

Offering a vibrant and brave space for dialogue among people from different contexts is at the heart of this event. The Symposium programme features a number of speakers offering local, national and international perspectives. Please see below for the provisional programme with more speakers and information to be announced soon!

Venue

The symposium will be hosted at our beautiful No17 conference venue at St Columba’s Hospice Care in Edinburgh. It will be offered as a hybrid event inviting both in-person and online participants and speakers. Online participants will be able to join via Zoom.

To register, please click on this link. Both online and in-person tickets are available. In-person tickets are limited to 40 and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

6 November 2026 Registration deadline (in-person participants)

18 November 2026 Registration deadline (online participants)

20 November 2026 Symposium

For further information about the symposium, please email arts@stcolumbashospice.org.uk

Provisional programme

To download the abstracts, please click here. Please note the programme is subject to minor changes. Poster presentations will be announced in September.

9.30	Welcome	Aileen Keel and Richard Butt
10.00	Encountering the arts in life, death and grief	Giorgos Tsiris
10.15	Bringing death back into life – how engagement with the arts nurtures dialogue about existential themes	Wolfgang Schmid, Jill Halstead, Christiaan Rhodius & Lin Stafne-Pfisterer
11.30	Break
12.00	Everything we love we wll lose	YARA + DAVINA (Online)
12.30	Bringing young musicians into a hospice environment: Insights from a school-hospice partnership	Robert Baxter, Bruce Armstrong and Giorgos Tsiris
	Music performance	St Mary’s Music School
13.00	Lunch break
13.30	Poster presentations and exhibitions
14.00	Parallel workshops:
	Visualising care networks in palliative care – who’s missing from the picture?	Puck Hoitinga
	Creative encounters with finitude	Zoi Simopoulou
	An embodied encounter with life, death and grief	Sally McRae and Sara Coffey
	“Love You – Bye!	Georgia Apsion
	Encounters and endings in group music improvisation	Bruce Armstrong
	Portrains of the self (in-person)	Willy Gilder
	Exploring life and death with Edward Munch – an improvised dialogue	Christiaan Rhodius and Wolfgang Schmid
15.00	Break
15.20	Responsiveness to grief and loss through creative arts therapies and integrative modalities in pediatric medical/surgical hospital	Todd O’Connor
15.50	The importance of outdoor spaces at a children’s hospice: an arts and therapeutic play perspective (in-person)	Rachel Drury and Donna Nicoll
16.30	Close