A master’s degree in narrative medicine was not exactly the most obvious next step for M.S. in Narrative Medicine student Kay Kasparhauser. The New York City-based writer and visual artist earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014 and spent a number of years after graduation honing her specialization in 3D mixed-media sculpture; in 2025 she had her first solo show at a gallery in Chinatown, an exhibition that used bug terrariums, polystyrene, latex, and other materials to explore ideas around decay.
Kasparhauser is also quick to point out that while the majority of her classmates are heading into health care careers that include stints at medical or nursing school, the last time she took science was in eighth grade. However, she explained in a recent interview, not only is she an artist whose visual work echoes some of the themes she has found in narrative medicine — “my work is largely about embodiment and disgust, death and sex, all of that fun stuff” — she has also spent her entire life managing an illness.
“I’m not premed, I’m not in med school, I’m not a clinician, I have no designs on becoming a clinician, and I’m not necessarily coming from the same angle as a lot of my classmates,” she explained. “But I come to the program with a CV of experience, and my experience is one of spending a lot of time in the hospital, of spending a lot of time speaking with doctors, of spending a lot of time studying what it means to have my body invaded and have images of my body taken that I then don’t understand. And all of these little intricacies of the patient experience that I find so fascinating, they are a huge part of my visual art practice.”
How have your studies in the Narrative Medicine program influenced your art?
So much of narrative medicine is thinking about who is giving an account and who is receiving an account. When we listen to a medical history, who is it addressed to, who is the person giving it, and what are they leaving out? And I think the artistic experience is a similar one. If the body is a work of art, how do you approach it? How do you talk about it? What are you saying with it? It’s about receiving and listening and dialoguing. That has radically impacted the way I think about art-making. Now my art is something that is to be viewed, which I was not consciously thinking about before.
What is your advice to other visual artists who are considering this program?
I think it really depends on the artist. For me, this program was the most direct way to approach the themes and the subjects that my art speaks on. It is a lot of reading, and that reading has really radically informed my art practice.
The financial aspect is very challenging for an artist. I’m not necessarily going to graduate from the program and go into a more lucrative career, so it’s an intentional decision I have to make every single day, that this is an investment I am making. There are valuable things to be learned. I think narrative medicine has the potential to be radically transformative. It can be this radical space where it is much more important to ask the question and listen for the answer than it is to get the answer. It is process-oriented over product-oriented, which is how I approach making art.
People get really annoyed when no one can describe narrative medicine. I understand, but maybe there should be something indescribable about the experience of opening your body to another human, to entering another human’s body as a doctor.
Do you have any favorite classes or professors?
Rika Burnham’s Works of Art course was my favorite. That class was so expansive, and when I speak about the radical potential of narrative medicine, I really found it in that class. Rika is so brilliant. Part of the class is that we go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every week and look at a piece of art and do a deep-looking exercise. I think a lot of people who are on a med school path aren’t necessarily thinking they are going to learn a lot that will inform their role as a doctor from going to the Met. But the way you look at a piece of art can directly inform and parallel the way you look at a body, and that is so useful and so interesting.
I also did a piece for a class I was fortunate enough to be in called Embodied Borderlands, taught by Dr. Sayantani DasGupta. I loved it because a lot of my sculptural work deals with penetrability and permeability, and this idea of being a permeable membrane — of the body being invaded and the experience of that. The class was very much about that, the idea of the body being a borderland. For the final, Dr. DasGupta allowed me to do a visual art piece. I did a series of three works using beeswax and sheep’s wool. I used wax to do an image transfer of my own medical imaging, such as MRIs, CAT scans, and X-rays, and I molded it with heat over casts of my own body. I wrote a four-page artist’s statement citing a lot of what we learned for class. I liked being able to put my money where my mouth is as far as being an artist in a non-arts program.
What is something about your experience in the Narrative Medicine program that has been surprising?
More than anything, I was surprised by how moved I have been by my classmates. I get to be surrounded by young people who want to be better doctors and who are doing this program before med school to be better prepared. They want to learn about this really important part of medicine, which is how we can seek to make medicine ethical. I am so moved when I look around my classroom and see these brilliant, brilliant young kids taking these courses so they can go into medicine more ethically prepared. It literally gives me hope for the future, which I was not expecting to get from this program.
About the Program
Columbia University’s Master of Science in Narrative Medicine prepares health professionals, writers, and scholars to apply the skills and values of narrative understanding to improve outcomes for both patients and caregivers. It offers a rigorous and in-depth study of close reading of creative texts, illness and disability narratives, narrative ethics, philosophy, creative writing, and other perspectives. The master’s program is available for part-time or full-time enrollment. Learn more here.
