A special narrative medicine event to find inspiration in the humanities and creative arts as a means to help navigate uncertain times.

Join us for our next Narrative Acts/Community Action event, where we will be joined by narrative medicine faculty and clinical anthropologist Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD and narrative medicine alumnx and multimedia artist and chronic illness patient advocate Sal Marx, who will share their work and experience with the community, including their collaborative narrative and visual art project, Lucid Dreaming Denial.

Narrative Acts/Community Action is a new narrative medicine virtual series to engage with our alumni, faculty and the global community as we explore through their work ways the humanities and creative arts are an actionable path toward community-centered change and responding to difficult times. Together we seek to find inspiration in the humanities and creative arts as individual and collective means to help navigate uncertain times through self-reflection and processing, advocacy and visibility, and connection with others.

Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD, a medical anthropologist, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medical Education at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. He teaches courses on health justice and the history of racism in medicine in the Narrative Medicine program. Through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded project, he is conducting ethnographic research on community youth workers in Los Angeles, New York City, and Amsterdam. Dr. Rivera Colón is also Course Director at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Certificate of Professional Achievement program where he trains students in qualitative research methods. He was a co-facilitator of the People’s CDC through his work at the University of Orange Free People’s University for Urban Restoration in Orange, New Jersey. His present book project is Love Comes in Knots: Postcards From The Dead. He is an ordained minister in The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM) specifically missioned as a social movement chaplain in Los Angeles. He is volunteer clergy with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) where he accompanies service economy workers in their struggles for decent compensation and benefits.

Sal Marx (they/them) is a multimedia artist(link is external and opens in a new window) and chronic illness patient advocate based in NYC. As an advocate for body/mind autonomy, Sal uses graphic medicine storytelling to amplify voices through a creative process of co-creation. They have a M.S. degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Public Policy, Psychology, and Media Studies from Pomona College. Above all, they work to empower patients and promote health justice in the biomedical sphere.  As a multimedia artist, Sal’s work has been shown in The Royal Alberta Museum (Canada) (2024-2025); Literature & Medicine at Johns Hopkins (2024, at Columbia University, NY, NY (2022); The Greenpoint Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019); MF Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019); Pomona College Studio Art Hall, Claremont, CA (2018).

Narrative Acts/Community Action will be a recurring event hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Narrative Acts/Community Actions is supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. This event will not be recorded for reasons of privacy.