Sasha Gusikhin founded NeuroArts Productions in response to a tragedy.

Luke Balstad was Gusikhin’s best friend, and a straight-A student at Harvard, but he also knew that he needed mental help assistance. Balstad was in therapy, was honest and open about his bipolar condition, and was attended to by a supportive network—but it still ended with him dying by suicide in 2022.

Balstad was being treated with medications—he tried at least 10—and therapy in the standardized modern way, but Gusikhin believes that let her friend slip through the cracks.

“No amount of checking in on Luke would have been able to save him," says Gusikhin, a University of Michigan senior double majoring in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience along with voice performance. "He had all of this care and yet there was all this impression with this one size fits all, this ‘let’s try this, and that, and that.' When we do that we are never attuned to: ‘What if this medication [causes a] toxic reaction to that person’s brain chemistry?’ It’s very dangerous, and it can cause very dangerous situations and even loss of life in this case.”

Gusikhin's NeuroArts Productions organizes multidisciplinary arts events to promote mental health education and reform.

“I want to be clear that we are never anti-medication, we are never anti-seeking treatment," she says. "But we’re very clear about advocating for the right treatment … not just the first line that is most profitable for an insurance company, but the one that is the right fit for your neurobiology.

"We know mental health is important," Gushikin continues, "but what is the root behind these problems? Is it the trial-and-error-treatment system? But there’s also the greater conversations: Why do we have a trial-and-error system? Who does it actually serve, and benefit? When we start talking about how it is more profitable for insurance—loss of life is actually profitable. … We have to fix it at the root, which is what we do at NeuroArts—we want to have these conversations through the arts because it allows you to have these tangible, emotional responses.”

NeuroArts' latest production, Path to Precision, is in downtown Ann Arbor through April 13 at 309 South Main Street (the former home of CultureVerse). The event combines a visual art exhibit with weekly performances at the venue through March 28, with a culminating event on April 12 at the First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor.

Path to Precision launched on March 14 with a concert by U-M’s improvisation-based Creative Arts Orchestra, conducted by saxophonist and U-M grad Marcus Elliot. On March 21, Three Movements for Migraine is a performance with Gusikhin, who plays flute, and Detroit cellist and guitarist King Sophia; it is designed to articulate what it feels like to suffer from chronic migraines.

The March 28 event is Healing Bells, featuring the performance art piece Ni une más, which expresses the experience of domestic violence and other trauma through collaborations with survivors. Gusikhin says it features “dance, a trio of singers, and piano. It’s an hour-long program that has been custom tailored to NeuroArts and our mission to talk about trauma and mental health, and how it's weaved together.” 

The closing April 12 event at the First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor will be a lecture recital on “all of these different pieces and [how these] threads are woven together," Gusikhin says. "I call it To Reimagine—how do we use the arts to reimagine the arts, to reimagine a world of true, person-centered care?”

For Path to Precision's visual arts gallery, Gusikhin invited creatives from around the area to produce works that focus on a mental condition that the artists have experienced or that has affected someone they know. The exhibit features more than 60 works from nearly 20 artists.

One of the most intriguing things about NeuroArts is the cutting-edge visualizer app, co-developed by Gusikhin, designer Matt Grossman from the Future States Design Agency, and developer Rameen Chahine. It was demonstrated during the Creative Arts Orchestra concert, and audience members used the app to record their in-the-moment emotional responses to the music.

"[The app has] this color wheel, which is also mapped to emotions,” Gusikhin says. “So, audience members would be clicking the color that corresponds to the music and their own unique perception.”

During the Creative Arts Orchestra show, an extra large TV screen displayed a QR code to download the visualizer app. After the audience was set, Elliot struck up the band, and the crowd used the app to record feelings evoked by the music. Once enough responses were recorded, an image appeared on the big TV: a stylized cross-section of a brain. The brain's gray matter was turned into a maze. The musicians used the audience's feedback as instructions—like those from a conductor—to change how they were playing.

The audience's interactions dictated where the app's multicolored dots went, leaving a worm-like trail through the brain—each person’s reactions going on a different path, through different regions, showing how everyone's minds are different.

“What you see on the screen the whole time is these little pathways … that was all audience collective input,” says Gusikhin, who played flute in the opening-night ensemble. “Whenever an audience member was clicking angry, or whatever it might be, they were seeing their pathway popping up on the screen. … And they could see their little pathway interacting with everyone else’s. So you could see the whole time how there were these moments where we might have a little color skewing going on, but most of the time it was very diverse in color, which points to the fact that everybody experiences the same music so differently, and that was a very tangible visualization of that exactly, which is why it is a metaphor for why taking individual experiences into account is so important in the healthcare system.”

Mixed media artist Angelica Esquivel, who has four embroidery pieces at Path to Precision, says the works she created for the exhibit were influenced by the visualizer: "[H]ow I can translate the way that I think in my head in the way that the visual translator was translating our emotions into color. I’m trying to do the same thing—adding color and texture, and different materials, to show the complexity of our emotions in our minds.”

Dr. Carol Persad, head of the U-M’s neuropsychology program and a guest who spoke at the post-concert discussion forum, had praise for the visualizer.

“I think [the app] was clearly something that was designed in the music school," Persad says. "It’s a very high-level concept. But this idea [of] being able to represent your feelings and emotions in a different way, other than just words, I think could have a lot of impact for a lot of people. This is why we have art therapy, music therapy. But many of us—even those who don’t have any significant mental health issues—have many times when we can’t really describe how we’re feeling in the moment. If you can potentially put some sort of label—even if it is a color to put meaning to it—and someone else can help you navigate through what’s going on can be very helpful. Let alone people who can’t communicate for themselves. There are people who have mutism, autistic kids, the aphasia population, and many others who can very much struggle … to demonstrate how they’re feeling can be very helpful.

“Being able to use the arts, as she does, as a different medium to get this across and see things differently is really a wonderful idea," Persad continues. “I love what they’ve done here in terms of having this direct interaction with the audience, and then respond back to that—so you get this interesting dynamic. I think that is something that I personally have never heard about before.”

Events such as Path to Precision are just the start for NeuroArts. Gusikhin graduates this spring and has NeuroArts expansion plans for this fall.

“We’ll have our performance events. We’re also working on our big musical theater work, to which we’re trying to get more traction," Gusikhin says. "[Also] musical therapy programs. ... We’re looking for partners in Ypsilanti, Detroit, and Ann Arbor, to bring in teams of integrated musicians and music therapists, to run musical sessions with individuals—but not just practice musical therapy but true advocacy of being able to personify people’s experiences within the healthcare system.”

A virtual reality system is another dream, and Gusikhin wants to work with the music therapy department at Eastern Michigan University and U-M to help develop the program.

“There’s a lot of different ways we can have versions of this," she says, "but the core foundation is: How do we use music and visual art and real-time adaptive art through technology, to actually be adaptive to what an individual client might need and want?”

Drew Saunders grew up in Whitmore Lake and fell in love with A2 when he started going for karate lessons downtown at Keith Haffner’s. Studying journalism at Eastern Michigan University, he began freelancing in 2013 with the Ann Arbor Observer, and then so many other publications. He obtained a Master of Science degree in the field from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2019. In addition to writing for Pulp, Saunders specializes in business and environmental journalism. 

NeuroArts Production's Path to Precision exhibition continues through April 13 at 309 South Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor, with individual performances there on March 21 and March 28 as well as an event on April 12 at First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor. You can listen to a podcast interview with NeuroArts founder Sasha Gusikhin on the University of Michigan Arts Initiative page here.