Fleming’s anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, was published this spring. A prominent advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience, as Artistic Advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fleming launched the first ongoing collaboration between America’s national cultural center and its largest health research institute, the National Institutes of Health. She created her own program called Music and the Mind, which she has presented in more than 60 cities around the world.

In May at the Metropolitan Opera, Fleming starred in The Hours, an opera based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and award-winning film. In 2023 Fleming received the Grammy® Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo for her album Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, with Yannick Nézet-Seguin as pianist. The same year, Decca released a special double-length album of live recordings from Fleming’s iconic performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Renée Fleming: Greatest Moments at the Met. Her voice is featured on the soundtracks of Best Picture Oscar® winners The Shape of Water and The Lord of the Rings.

Advisor for Special Projects at LA Opera, Fleming is also co-artistic director of the Aspen Opera Center and VocalArts at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Fleming’s other awards include the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and honorary doctorates from ten leading universities. www.reneefleming.com

He has published 75 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Neuron, and Cognition.

He earned his BA from Stanford University, and his PhD in psychology at the University of Oregon. He completed post-doctoral training at the Stanford University Medical School and at UC Berkeley. He writes about health, science and medicine for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and appears regularly on NPR. He is the author of five consecutive bestselling books: This Is Your Brain On Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, Successful Aging, and A Field Guide to Lies. His forthcoming book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, will be available this August.

As a musician (saxophone, guitar, vocals, and bass), he has performed with Mel Tormé, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, Sting, Renée Fleming, Victor Wooten, Neil Young, and David Byrne. He has produced and consulted on albums by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, and has been awarded 17 gold and platinum records.

Magsamen’s work focuses on how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the brain, body, and behavior, and how this knowledge can be translated to inform health, wellbeing, and learning programs in medicine, public health, and education.

She is also the author of Impact Thinking, an interdisciplinary translational research model to enhance human potential through the use of arts and aesthetics. This model is a generative framework that applies a new scientific method to arts and aesthetics research and, at the same time, considers how the research can be scaled, disseminated, and evaluated for impact. In addition to her role at IAM Lab, she is the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint project in partnership with the Aspen Institute. The Blueprint aims to create the field of Neuroarts where arts and aesthetics are mainstream in medicine and public health. Magsamen is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, written for the general public.