About MindBeamArts

D. Soyini Madison, PhD, has dedicated more than fifty years integrating the arts into practices that support learning, communication, wellness, brain health, and self-expression

D. Soyini Madison

Ph.D., FM-CHC, IIN-HCTP, HHC

THE FOUNDER

About D. Soyini Madison

D. Soyini Madison, Ph.D., FM-CHC, IIN-HCTP, HHC, has spent more than five decades exploring how creativity, learning, communication, and human wellbeing intersect. Her career spans roles as a teacher, actor, scholar, author, Illustrator, storyteller, stage director, and international field researcher.

Across classrooms, theatres, communities, and research environments, her work has consistently focused on one essential idea: creative expression supports how we learn, remember, connect, and heal. Art and creative expression help us understand and transform the world.

These decades of experience ultimately led to the creation of MindBeamArts, an integrative approach that joins communication, creative engagement, brain health, and whole-body wellness.

A LIFE IN THE ARTS

Creativity as a Foundation for Learning

D. Soyini Madison’s journey began in education, where she introduced students to a wide range of creative practices, including drawing, collage, painting, creative writing, storytelling, symbolic movement, and improvisation

Her creative learning in the classroom expanded into Theatre and Communication Arts. As a high school drama coach, she directed and adapted productions such as Pippin, West Side Story, Purlie Victorius, Barefoot in the Park, and The Wiz, to contemporary and more local questions and challenges for her students. While guiding students through improvisation, original storytelling, and stage crafts, she also taught poetry, literature, and creative writing.

Through her years as a high school drama, writing, and literature teacher on Chicago's South Side, Madison observed how profoundly creative practices inspire imagination and self-reflection as well as deeply focused learning and transformation.

Actor, Director, playwright

The Power of Narrative and Performance

While teaching theatre arts, literature, and creative writing, D. Soyini Madison was also active in the Chicago theatre community as an actor, director, and playwright.

Her original one-character play, Our Sun-Baked Lips Will Kiss the Earth, by Eugene Useni Perkins, toured throughout the United States in the 1970s.

GLOBAL RESEARCH

Fieldwork and Performance Ethnography

In 1984, D. Soyini Madison pursued a Ph.D. in Performance Studies

at Northwestern University in the Department of Performance Studies with a focus on Performance Ethnography.

Her dissertation research took her to Ghana, West Africa, where she worked closely with Local, Ghanaian women’s rights activists. Immersed in witnessing and supporting their lives, experiences, stories, and global justice work. Madison documented the power of their collective expressions, interventions, creative communication, and local storytelling through the transformative power of public performance.

Is It a Human Being or a Girl
& Water Rites

Both plays were performed in Ghana by students from the University of Ghana and later staged in the United States at the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill

Her work documenting this experience later became the book:

Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance

In her book, Madison presents the neglected yet compelling and necessary story of local activists in West Africa who employ modes of performance as tactics of resisitance and intervention in their day-to-day struggles for human rights

Creativity and the Brain

After decades of teaching and research, D. Soyini Madison began exploring a question that had quietly followed her throughout her career:

What happens in the brain when we engage with art?

The Girl & Seahorse

- Illustrations from the "Seahorse & Sister Sage" a mythic narrative play by D. Soyini Madison

Seahorse Revolution

The Girl, The Grandfather

& The Cosmos

MindBeamArts Today

Now in her late seventies, D. Soyini Madison continues to explore how creativity, lifestyle, and scientific insights can work together to support wellbeing and longevity.

Madison's MindBeamArts approach is inspired by:

NeuroArts and DailyCreativity

Integrative and Functional Medicine

Dale E. Bredesen, MD, and the End of Alzheimer's Protocol to Enhance Cognition.

Lifestyle Habits that Support Cognitive Vitality, Brain Health & Whole Person Wellness.

Artistic Engagement as a Pathway to Brain Energy, Active Memory and the Senses.