Dr Kiara Wickremasinghe

Kiara is a Career Development Research Fellow at CAMHRA. She recently earned her PhD in Anthropology at SOAS University of London, funded by a Bloomsbury Colleges PhD Studentship. 

Her PhD formed part of a wider ESRC-funded Anthropological Study of Peer-supported Open Dialogue conducted by a team of anthropologists and clinicians (led by Prof. David Mosse), who followed the first randomised controlled trial of ‘Open Dialogue’, a social network approach to psychiatric crisis care. Towards this, she trained and worked as an Open Dialogue practitioner and peer support worker in a London NHS Trust, where she remains a visiting trainer and speaker on themes including recovery, diversity, peer support and co-production.

Kiara’s research trajectory has been diverse, having read for a BA in Geography at the University of Cambridge and an MA in Music in Development at SOAS University of London. She is also an opera singer, violinist and composer, and during her previous postdoctoral research role at Birkbeck University of London, was awarded a Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust IFRC grant to undertake a pilot project on opera and mental health in Sri Lanka. 

Kiara is broadly interested in ‘lived experience’ in mental health care and uses her ethnographic positioning as an anthropologist, mental health practitioner, peer and person of colour to explore this concept. She is also interested in the potential of arts-based interventions for enhancing wellbeing in cultural contexts where talking about mental health is stigmatised.