The new category, Human Lens: The Lived Experience, is a category that elevates authentic human experiences, honoring work that is rooted in authentic patient, caregiver, and community experiences. This new category will celebrate storytelling that gives voice to real lives, challenges stereotypes, and fosters empathy, understanding, and connection.

In this series of the Health Pulse, we will get the inside scoop on what strikes a chord with members of our Specialty Jury for this inaugural year. 

For more than 25 years, Glenn Batkin has built a career in advertising as an award-winning Creative Director and Art Director, helping brands find ideas that feel less like messaging and more like something people recognize in themselves. His career has been shaped by a simple instinct: look closer. Past the brief, past the expected answer, past the surface of what a brand says it wants to say. That is usually where the better idea lives.

Glenn’s goal is never just to make something look good. It is to find the human truth that gives an idea weight, and makes people care. His work has been recognized by Clio, Cannes, New York Festivals, and London International Awards.

NYFH Awards: Why did you say yes to judging this category specifically—what made you want to be part of it?
Glenn Batkin: Because health work is at its best when it begins with a human truth, not a marketing objective. I’ve spent my career looking for the thing beneath the brief—the feeling or experience that makes people recognize something in themselves. This category puts that front and center. I also like that it asks more of us. It is not enough to make work about people. The people whose lives are being represented need to have had a real hand in shaping it. That is a standard worth celebrating.

NYFH Awards: Why do you think the Human Lens category is important right now, and what does recognizing work shaped by real patient and caregiver experiences bring to health communications?
Glenn Batkin: Health communications can become too clinical. But being sick, caring for someone, or living with a disability isn’t abstract. It changes how someone sees themselves and moves through the world. When people with lived experience help shape the work, the storytelling becomes more specific and more honest. It can move beyond simply raising awareness to making someone feel seen. That is where empathy begins, and where communication can actually change how people think and act.

NYFH Awards: Have you worked on something where a patient, caregiver and/or someone living with disability changed the direction of the work — not just the creative, but an actual decision?
Glenn Batkin: My father had MS, and ultimately lost his life to it. Over many years, we had deeply personal conversations about what the disease had taken from him, but also about how reductive other people’s understanding of it could be. When I later worked on an MS campaign, those conversations changed the direction of the work at its core. The idea came from him. It was not simply inspiration for the execution; it informed the decision about what the campaign needed to say and how it needed to say it. That experience has stayed with me. The people living the reality often understand the real story in a way no brief ever can.

NYFH Awards: This category recognizes work made with people, not simply about them. What tells you that lived experience genuinely shaped an entry?
Glenn Batkin:You can feel it in the details. The work avoids the familiar shorthand and the tidy, inspirational version of a difficult life. It contains the contradictions and specificity that come from a real point of view. But I also want to understand the process. Who was in the room? At what point were they involved? Did their perspective change the insight or the final work? Genuine collaboration leaves fingerprints. The strongest entries will make those fingerprints visible.

NYFH Awards: Five years from now, what would you want this category to have changed about the industry?
Glenn Batkin: I would hope it has made lived experience a normal part of how health work is developed, not a category to enter after the fact. The real success would be an industry that brings people in earlier and listens more carefully. If this category helps make health communications more truthful and more human, that is a meaningful change.