This CFA Student Is Using Art to Help Medical Patients
Jieun Lim’s unusual path began with her own cancer diagnosis. Now, Lim (CFA’26) is earning a master of arts in art education and runs crafting workshops at Boston Medical Center for chemotherapy patients
This CFA Student Is Using Art to Help Medical Patients
Jieun Lim’s unusual path began with her own cancer diagnosis
This article was originally published in BU Today on July 8, 2025. By Alene Bouranova. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
EXCERPT
Artistically, Jieun Lim has lived many lives. Furniture design, sculpture, photography, painting, puppeteering—her repertoire has touched on a little bit of everything. Now, Lim (CFA’26) is at Boston University earning a master of arts in art education. Her plan? Using art to help individuals in medical settings. For her latest project, she runs crafting workshops at Boston Medical Center (BMC) for chemotherapy patients. It’s a passion born out of her own journey as a cancer patient.
The “Art of Waiting” workshops are a part of Arts|Lab, a collaboration between the College of Fine Arts and the BU Medical Campus. Once a month, Lim and other Arts|Lab volunteers head to the chemo waiting area at BMC armed with art supplies. Once there, they lead any interested patients through simple crafts—origami, pipe cleaner sculptures, booklet-making, finger puppets—anything that keeps hands and minds occupied. (Volunteers are responsible for brainstorming and planning different crafts.)
As a patient, “waiting time is often [unpredictable],” says Lim, who joined the Arts|Lab initiative in January. “We try to take the fear out of that vulnerable time by helping people do something using their hands.”
Creating healing experiences
Lim spent about eight years as a furniture designer and artist. Her noncommercial work was inherently playful, she says, with funky shapes and soft colors reflective of her childhood. Now? Playfulness is her MO.
Lim had been exploring how to incorporate elements of play into everyday objects with her furniture designs. In CFA’s master of arts in art education program, “I’ve extended that sense of play into [creating] more interactive and healing experiences,” she says. “That led me to become involved in puppetry classes.”
Lim has been studying puppeteering with Felice Amato, a CFA assistant professor of art, art education. It borrows elements of both stage and furniture design, which Lim enjoys. This summer, she’s the teaching assistant for an Amato-led puppetry elective for art teachers in an online master’s program.
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After graduation, Lim hopes to work in medical settings, doing things like using puppets to help educate young patients about their symptoms, for instance.
Lim says that after her diagnosis, she “realized that there is a healthy way to express agony through creativity. Now, it is my turn to offer and share with others what I’ve experienced through art during difficult times. I feel more capable of creating meaningful work and helping others participate in it.”
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About BU’s MA Art Education Program
The Art Education degree is designed for teachers who already have state licensure, or for individuals who are interested in pursuing research in the field of art education and do not require licensure. The program allows students to concentrate on individually selected areas of study that include developing methods that teach children and adolescents to think visually and to create art that has personal meaning in schools, museums, or community settings.
About Arts|Lab
Open to all student artists in BU College of Fine Arts, this unique collaboration thinks about healthcare as an unbiased context to reencounter art’s transformative power. It’s a space with no mistakes and an approach to creativity with openness, genuineness and true communication. Working with colleagues and patients at BU Medical Campus, this partnership provides endless opportunities to learn, honor, enrich and transform.