Sundara O Higgins

Sundara O Higgins works as Community Art and Wellness Curator for IMMA Horizons, IMMA’s Inclusive Art and Wellbeing programme. Their practice operates at the intersection of art, health, ecology, and community, drawing on an understanding of the social determinants of health—particularly access, social connection, and the cultural and environmental conditions that enable people to thrive. They foreground equity, as well as sensory and movement-based engagement, supporting intergenerational participation through cross-museum collaboration and partnerships with diverse external collaborators.

They design and guide co-created programmes with participants and partners that open up cultural spaces, foster a sense of belonging, and enable participants to engage critically and creatively with the ideas, themes, and material practices that shape the museum context. Their work seeks to harness the experiential and conceptual power of contemporary art to generate understanding, connection, and care across social, ecological, and cultural spheres. Through this approach, they cultivate critical insight and dialogue, positioning contemporary art as a lens through which these relationships can be explored and reimagined.

Sundara O Higgins will be speaking at the Museums & Public Program Summit 2026 :

Ecological and Participatory Approaches in Museum Practice

This session highlights IMMA Horizons’ innovative programming, including a sculptural potato planting in the museum’s collection – planted with traditional tools in collaboration with a local horticulture college. Ephemeral and ever-changing, it engaged staff, students and the public, challenging ideas of what an artwork is and who “owns” it. Workshops in wild food, seed sovereignty, plant dyeing and cyanotype connected participants to land, heritage and embodied knowledge. In parallel, MOVING SIGNATURES intergenerational engagement project responded to artworks through physical-phrases and slow looking, culminating in a site responsive performance foregrounding knowledge held in the body and its interaction with space.