Veronica Franklin Gould FRSA
VeronicArts is led by art historian and biographer, Veronica Franklin Gould. President of Arts 4 Dementia (A4D), she founded the charity in 2011 to develop re-energising learning and participation programmes, with training in partnership with arts venues to empower individuals and family carers to preserve their brain health through arts.
Arts 4 Dementia 2009-19 – Inspired by the London Olympics 2012
Working in association with universities, inviting arts and medical students to interact with participants for mutual benefit and to help spread the practice, her aim has been for patients to be referred to weekly artistic stimulation on diagnosis, as cognitive rehabilation and reablement.
A4D Social Prescribing Programme 2019-21
The introduction of surgery-based link workers spurred Veronica’s campaign for social prescribing to re-energising arts to be offered to patients at the earliest possible opportunity, to protect against isolating strain in the lead-up to diagnosis and preserve their brain health and resilience in the community for years longer.
Awards and nominations
- Social Prescribing Innovator of the Year Finalist 2021 (Award Sponsor: South West Academic Health Science Network)
- NIACE Adult Learners Week Highly Commended 2015.
- The Sunday Times Changemakers Finalist 2014
- National Breakthrough Positive Practice in Mental Health Dementia Award 2013
- London 2012 Inspire Mark.
VeronicArts 2022–24
Veronica runs Global Arts for Brain Health webinars, initially in association with Sir Muir Gray, Director of the Optimal Ageing Programme at The University Oxford, reaching 40 countries around the world. She presents papers nationally and internationally to help spread Arts for Brain Health practice.
Charitable roles
Veronica is President of Arts for Dementia, Trustee of The Amber Trust, Vice-President of Decibels (Music for the Deaf) and on the advisory boards of the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowships and British Society for Lifestyle Medicine.
Art historical background:
After an early career in art publishing, training in fine and decorative arts at Christie’s of London, Veronica researched the lives and curated the centenary exhibitions of Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau (Watts Gallery 1998) and of her husband The Vision of G. F. Watts (2004), writing his biography G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (Yale University Press, 2004), and curating the bicentenary exhibition of the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tennyson at Farringford (2009). Veronica paused her double biography intertwining Watts’s two wives, the teenage actress Ellen Terry and the craftswoman Mary Fraser Tytler to set up A4D and is now resuming their double biography in tandem with her Global Arts for Brain Health webinar programme.
Her biography Valiant Seton: Mary Fraser Tytler of Aldourie will be published on 25 November 2024.
