About Us

Our Purpose

Our Progress

Art for Minds began in fall 2023 as part of the Youth Creating Change (YCC) Fellowship with Communities United Against Hate in Montgomery County, Maryland. With mentorship and grant support from YCC, we curated our first regional exhibition in spring 2024, collaborating with ten D.C.-Maryland-Virginia schools to highlight youth perspectives on identity and well-being. Building on that experience, we are expanding our reach internationally. Our upcoming 2026 global exhibition connects young artists from Asia, the Americas, and beyond, exploring how migration, heritage, and belonging shape the ways youth express mental health. This next chapter reflects what we have learned: that ideas of well-being grow out of place and culture, and that sharing those perspectives across regions can bring people closer together.

The past decades have seen a growing awareness of youth mental health, with research and reports painting an urgent and complex picture. Yet as high schoolers, we often noticed that conversations about these issues remained surface-level; detached from the cultural, linguistic, and social contexts that shape lived experience. In many communities, mental health remains taboo, and stigma continues to silence essential dialogue. We founded Art for Minds to use art as a bridge between personal experience and collective understanding. Through creative expression, we explore how identity, language, and cultural background influence emotional well-being, and how stories told through art can foster empathy and dialogue across global communities.

Our Team

JL Chretien

Co-Founder, Sidwell Friends School

Astrid Virk

Co-Founder, Sidwell Friends School

We’re JL and Astrid, now seniors at Sidwell Friends School, who co-founded Art for Minds from a shared belief that creativity can build bridges across cultures and deepen understanding of shared human experiences. For both of us, art has been a language for navigating uncertainty and expressing emotion that transcends words and connects people across borders. Our first regional exhibition in 2023, Identity and Intersectionality, brought together students from diverse backgrounds to explore how culture and self-expression intersect in the shaping of identity.

That summer, Astrid attended a residential program in New Haven, Connecticut, studying literature, culture, and global perspectives with peers from more than 150 countries. Conversations about mental health and belonging across societies inspired her to consider how values and traditions influence emotional life and how dialogue can lead to mutual understanding.

Later that summer, we participated in a cultural and linguistic immersion program in China, where we worked with students, artists, and educators to study how communities sustain cultural heritage while adapting to rapid modernization. Experiencing these contrasts firsthand strengthened our interest in transnational exchange and in understanding how art can reflect the evolving relationships between culture, identity, and well-being across the Asia-Pacific region.

These experiences continue to guide our work as Art for Minds expands globally. We aim to create platforms where young artists from different cultures can explore how mental health, migration, and creativity intersect. Through this dialogue, we’ve learned that compassion is both personal and cross-cultural, and that art, at its most powerful, reveals the shared aspirations that unite us.