Anna Dumitriu acted as lead artist in collaboration with Professor Helen Smith (Chair of Primary Care - Brighton and Sussex Medical School) working with students from Varndean School on a project about allergy entitled "Sensitive".

The project is transdisciplinary and crosses the boundary between art and science enabling a greater understanding of allergy through scientific research and innovative art techniques (such as live art, video, phone art, gps and installation).

Anna Dumitriu writes “This project was borne out of a collaboration between Professor Helen Smith from Brighton and Sussex Medical School and me. It links art and science; specifically installation, intervention and performance art to allergy. I believe that to fully express any concept or idea both art and science are needed and through art we can create a synthesis between our emotional responses to the world and scientific analysis."

Allergies affect everyone on a personal level, if not at first hand, through friends and family. But there is a huge amount of misunderstanding about how allergic reactions actually happen, what effects they have physically and what the best ways of dealing with them are. We chose to work with year 9 and 10 pupils on this because as an age group they are often most affected, from an artistic point of view this was a conceptual choice and adds, for me, a deeper layer of meaning to the final artworks. From a scientific point of view it has been about creating understanding of the subject for the students but also about feeding back into patient management strategies some of what has been learned from actually working with the students.