Feature 23 July 2026

Hungry for change

When doctors couldn’t reach her through the grip of an eating disorder, one artist realised her survival depended on finding another way

A painting of a woman lying down, extending her long tongue upward to balance a cake with strawberries on top. The pink background subtly references the "starving artist myth," creating a whimsical yet poignant commentary on the complex relationship between artists and eating disorders.

Ally Zlatar

Artist, scholar and activist

reading time: Six minutes

Arts and society Health & wellbeing Mental health

Summary

Artist, scholar and activist Dr Ally Zlatar explores the collision between the romantic myth of the ‘starving artist’ and the lived reality of eating disorders. Drawing on her own experience, Zlatar reflects on how art helped her communicate what clinical systems often failed to see: the complexities and contradictions of illness. Through The Starving Artist initiative, she uses creative practice to challenge stereotypes, support marginalised voices and advocate for systems that listen more deeply to embodied experience.

^{Main image: Realm of Ideas, 2025}

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I remember the first time I started having disordered eating thoughts. I was about 13 years old, in the eighth grade at my middle school in Canada, and I just happened to notice a girl – who was thinner than me – smiling. I felt like I wanted to smile, too. For some reason, that smile led me to skip one meal, and then another, eventually launching me into the arms of a severe eating disorder that would grip me for over a decade.

My traditional Eastern European family could not understand the depths of the disease I was grappling with. They thought, ‘Just eat; it’s really not that hard’. They couldn’t possibly understand that I was engaged in a constant battle of trying to cope with the world around me. My body was so weak I couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs; even just sitting in a bathtub hurt, my bones pressing against the hard smooth surfaces of the tub. My relationship with my body was the only way I felt able to exert control.

Cue the next five years of medical treatments: different inpatient programmes, cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy and truthfully none of it helped. Medical practitioners saw only a diagnosis; they didn’t see the person suffering behind the disease. I felt like no one could see the ME inside, struggling so desperately to make sense of the world around me.

Staring at a slice of red velvet cake that I waited two days to eat, I was sitting on my bedroom floor both excited and terrified to eat. It was my battle, that only I was fighting. And in that moment, I realised I was all alone… and in the end, all that was left was me and the disease

Art opens me up

But something finally did break through, and that something was art. Art was not only a space for me to process, reflect and engage with the complexities and difficulties I was feeling and enduring, but a tool for those around me to get a glimpse behind the curtain of my true experiences, both physical and mental.

Today, through my work and my art, I explore eating disorders (EDs) beyond the dominant clinical narratives that frequently reduce them to mere diagnostic categories or visual stereotypes. Medical language describes behaviours and patterns, it can even measure progress, but it rarely captures the strange, often otherworldly logic of living inside an ED. I believe that disconnect is a big part of the reason why I struggled for so long to get well. Now, I use my art and voice to explore the intricate mind–body relationship of wellbeing. My work attempts to move beyond the polished, over simplified ideas of illness and recovery that tend to flatten lived experience into something neat and easily consumed.

I’m interested in what happens when discomfort, contradiction and uncertainty are allowed to remain visible. My work positions art not as cure, but as testimony, revealing how creative practice can expose the failures of systems that often misread, silence or simplify what it means to be ‘unwell’. And instead of just thinking about the body as something to be ‘repaired’ (the medical viewpoint), I try to view it as a site where memory, care and control all collide. So much in my own paintings emerges from that point of tension between what is visible and what remains hidden.

Too often, those living with EDs (not to mention other mental health disorders) are positioned as ‘too ill’ or ‘too unfit’ to contribute meaningfully to the dialogue around the illness, much less their own treatment, which can lead to their exclusion from dominant conversations about mental health and the perpetuation of unhelpful stereotypes. Contemporary representations of EDs often fall into narrow cultural scripts, either romanticised fragility or simplified illness narratives. My art insists on the harsh reality of EDs, while also acknowledging the paradox: humour, satire and absurdity as survival strategies within the experience itself.

A painting of a person in red religious robes and a mitre, framed by a gothic window, surrounded by colourful fruits like oranges, bananas, and blueberries—this vibrant scene set against a pink background subtly challenges the starving artist myth by celebrating abundance and the importance of nourishment in the lives of artists. — *Mother of Anorexia*, 2026

Illness as muse

I Was Blind to My Illness employs an approach I call ‘memoryscapes’, where I invite viewers into some key points of the grim reality of living with an ED. This work was a glimpse into my first admission into an ED treatment programme, a time when I was not able to accept that I was even struggling at all. Here, the viewer is physically and conceptually invited in, challenging the assumption that objectivity must come from distance.

The visual works developed in this study resist aestheticisation of illness. Instead, they attempt to hold discomfort, contradiction and emotional intensity. In my painting Facing the Skeletons in My Closet, for example, the body is not idealised or resolved. It is satirised, fragmented, and shows that recovery is not linear but unstable, and insistently present.

Mother of Anorexia invites viewers to attend a fictional ‘Mass’ in which God absolves participants through the sins of restriction, control and self-denial. The piece draws on my long-standing interest in the relationship between religion and eating disorders, particularly the ways both can shape identity through systems of belief, ritual and obedience. The work recognises how closely the logic of EDs can resemble religious devotion, creating rigid internal commandments: rules around purity, discipline and morality that begin to structure everyday life. The piece examines how easily suffering can become ritualised, and how self-denial is often reframed culturally as virtue.

A woman in pink pyjamas holding a cat stands by a doorway, facing a human skeleton inside a cupboard—a haunting nod to the starving artist myth. The background is pink. — *Facing the skeletons in my closet*, 2026

Enter the artist

As my practice developed, I also began to prioritise the connection and promotion of authentic and vulnerable communication around unwell bodies. While I hoped my own voice was powerful, I knew it was not the only voice that needed to be heard. That’s why, in 2017, I founded The Starving Artist, an initiative that draws on creative voices to create advocacy and systemic reform. It was conceived as a singular exhibition. I hoped to find perhaps five people wanting to explore the theme of body image but, when over 200 people showed interest in participating, it inspired me to continue the work. As momentum built, I expanded the themes (including health equity, migration and gendered wellbeing) and the community continued to grow.

To date, The Starving Artist has positively impacted more than 100,000 lives across 30+ countries through initiatives including The Starving Artist Scholarship Fund, which helps people access inpatient mental health treatment, and The Starving Artist Publishing Studio, which platforms marginalised artists (10 publications to date sharing over 1,000 distinct experiences of artist un-wellness). The Starving Artist also creates change through exhibitions, public talks and campaigns focused on wellbeing and social justice.

One of the main reasons we’ve had so much impact is, I believe, because we are one of the few organisations currently creating spaces for these conversations. Systems struggle to hold the complexity these conversations demand. They diagnose, categorise and treat, but too often do not listen.

Art cannot resolve an illness; but it reveals it. My goal, through my art and work with The Starving Artist, is to help reclaim the figure of the ‘starving artist’, not as a romantic trope, but as a way of examining the realities of illness, vulnerability and survival. To ask what it means to live within systems that repeatedly fail to hold the complexity of embodied experience and, in doing so, move beyond clinical narratives to foreground something more human, unstable and difficult to contain.

Fundamentally, the work arrives at a simple proposition: systems fail; art does not.

Dr Ally Zlatar is an artist, scholar and activist, and Founder of The Starving Artist; she is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Teesside, examining art and medical ethics. She has received numerous accolades for humanitarian work, including Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social Impact (Asia, 2025), Commonwealth Innovation Awards (2023), UNWomen 30 for 2030 (2024) and winner of The Princess Diana Legacy Award (2021). Zlatar has lectured at the University of Sharjah (UAE) and has taught at the University of Glasgow, KICL London and the University of Essex.

Knowledge grows when shared.

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