Bio
Diana Farid MD, MPH is a physician, poet, filmmaker and award-winning author. She is a staff physician at the Stanford Vaden Health Center and clinical assistant professor in the Stanford Department of Medicine. She holds a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Berkeley, with a concentration in public health, socio-economic development and human rights. She was awarded a fellowship by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve as a Child and Family Health Leadership Fellow at UCLA while earning a Masters in Public Health focusing on community health sciences, health communications and story as a means for health behavior change.
She has provided public health education and health care in rural villages in Honduras, advocated for peace in the Ukraine and Malaysia, coordinated education programs at the School of the Nations in Macau, China, worked at the US Agency for International Development, Center for Human Rights and Democracy for Latin America and the Caribbean, and has advocated for equity, human rights and violence prevention at both Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Human Rights.
She creates and amplifies stories to compel and foster the health and human connections needed to create a better world.
As a physician consultant for The Media Project, Advocates for Youth, Diana provided on and off camera expertise to television and film writers and producers for TV shows such as GREY’S ANATOMY and STRONG MEDICINE, to promote adolescent health through entertainment. Her debut feature length documentary film production, AMERICAN RHYTHMS (2008) (americanrhythmsmovie.com/), celebrates the positive impact of music on a group of elementary school students.
As the Assistant Director of Stanford School of Medicine’s Program in Bioethics and Film, she produced film screenings and discussions with producers, directors, field experts, Stanford faculty, students and the community, exploring films with vital bioethical implications. She established the first Stanford Film and Medicine Interest group for medical students to study film as a health promotion tool and has mentored medical student film projects. She was a lead producer of the 2018 Stanford Frankenstein@200 year-long film screening series and panels on the cultural, social and bioethical impact of medical research, technology and healthcare through the lens of story in film.
She writes poetry, essays, picture books and verse novels. Her poems have been presented in anthologies, journals, gallery exhibits and live story telling events, including The Nocturnists. Her poem, Dear Medicine, is part of the seminal 2019 report by the National Academy of Medicine, “Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout”.
Her multi-awarding winning picture book, WHEN YOU BREATHE (Abrams), melds respiratory science with poetry. The School Library Journal describes WHEN YOU BREATHE as a “blue-green garden-galaxy [with] metaphors [that] swirl into an understanding that our human bodies don’t stand over the natural world, but are part of it.” WHEN YOU BREATHE’s Korean translation released in the spring of 2022. Her verse novel, WAVE (Abrams, 2022), noted as “Raw and powerful…Rich, layered and heart-rending” — Kirkus, has been featured in Publisher’s Weekly, We Need Diverse Books, and the School Library Journal, among others. It’s received numerous honors including being called a Best Middle Grade Book of 2022 by the School Library Journal. WAVE highlights the power of music and poetry in wellness.
Her regular speaking events for students and educators champion the inextricable link between art, story, health and peace.
