Performance and discussion: Be my skin: The science and art of care

Blending mesmerizing artwork, playful interaction, and inspiring dialogue with interdisciplinary experts, this one-hour immersive experience explores how happiness and health are not passive states to be consumed but active experiences that emerge through participation, connection, and care—a truth that nurses have always embodied and that biomarker science is only now beginning to measure. The experience positions nurses as artists of care: creative practitioners who carry, in their bodies and daily work, the full biological and relational truth of what makes life worth living.

The experience opens with a poetic and humorous short performance by artist Marisa Morán Jahn exploring the power of nursing as a skin linking an individual's life to the world. With the intimate address of someone tucking a child into bed, Jahn weaves through the stages of life alongside historical moments, inviting the audience to see themselves as both an individual and a collective body for whom nurses have always been critical.

Following the performance, Jahn moderates a conversation with Sarah Szanton, Dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and founder of the CAPABLE and Neighborhood Nursing programs. Their exchange moves between the personal and the public, honoring the framework established by the performance, and concludes with open audience dialogue.

Across four movements—performance, reflection, dialogue, and experience exchange—this event reveals that what nurses do daily is both science and art: a creative practice of care that sustains health and imagines what the future can be.