 All right, good evening, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us. My name is Dan. I am the Director of Development and Programming for the Bed for Playhouse. And welcome to the second installment of our Autism Awareness Week, where we're gonna be talking about art and autism. We have a really, really great panel who's gonna present for you this evening. But before we start, I just wanna remind everybody, please feel free at any point during the conversation to post a question if you have one. You will find the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen if you're on a laptop or PC. If you are on an iPad or phone, it should be at the top of your screen. And you can ask a question at any point and there'll be some time at the end of the conversation where the panel will take questions. I should mention that Bed for Playhouse is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. And we are always thankful and appreciative for the support of the community. So if you enjoy the program tonight and you'd like to see us do more like it, please consider spending a few extra minutes on your computer and go into our website, which is bedforplayhouse.org and making a contribution. Every little bit is appreciated. With that being said, I'd like to introduce our moderator for tonight, Dr. Michelle Gorenstein, who is going to tell us a little bit about herself and then introduce the rest of the panel. Hi, Michelle. Hi, thank you so much for having me this evening. So my name is Michelle Gorenstein. I am a clinical psychologist and I'm also the director of community outreach at the Siever Autism Center at Mount Sinai. And today I'm going to be wearing my other hat because I spend a lot of time focusing on how to kind of improve accessibility in the community and specifically the arts. So I'm very excited to introduce several people on this panel who I'm lucky enough to call colleagues. So I will start by and how we decided to do this today. I'm going to introduce everybody and then I'm going to ask everybody on the panel the same three questions and then we will open it up for audience questions. So I first would like to introduce Elisa Greenberg. Elisa specializes in the intersection of arts and learning, arts and disability, schools and cultural organization and educators and artists. Elisa's work spans professional development workshops, the classroom, the rehearsal space and the administrative offices. Elisa is the arts enrichment coordinator at the Learning Spring School in New York City. She is a teaching artist at Colab Theater Group and is the project leader of the Supporting Transitions Project at the Museum, Arts and Cultural Access Consortium. And the goal of that project is to increase opportunities for adults with autism and other developmental and intellectual disabilities at cultural organizations. So thank you, Elisa. I would now like to introduce Melanie Adsut and she is the senior project manager of Guggenheim for All as a museum educator and education and access consultant. Melanie has trained staff and developed access programs at a wide range of cultural institutions for over 20 years. Prior to joining the Guggenheim, Melanie worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the 92nd Street Y, the Museum of Modern Art and the Queens Museum of Art, as well as Shine Arts, a nonprofit organization providing arts programming and professional development for students with disabilities and foster pride providing arts programs and mentoring to young people in foster care. Melanie has also provided staff training and program development in the arts for the New York City Department of Education and contributed to the special education section of blueprint for teaching and learning in the arts. Melanie holds a BA in Art and Psychology from Boston University and a MA in Art and Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. And she is currently a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, researching museum programs for students on the autism spectrum. And I'm gonna introduce Larissa Koninsky. She is the manager of accessibility services at TDF, the Theater Development Fund, where her work focuses on making Broadway and off-Broadway productions more accessible to audience members with disabilities. Prior to TDF, Larissa was working in the museum field as an accessibility specialist and educator with a focus on implementing new programming for individuals on the autism spectrum. Additionally, Larissa has volunteered with ballet for all kids and participated in their training program to become a certified inclusive ballet teacher. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Museum Arts and Cultural Access Consortium and was a founding board member of the Michigan Alliance for Cultural Accessibility. Last but not least, we have Dr. Blythe Corbett. She is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is the director of the Social Emotional Neuroscience Endocrinology Lab, a transitional research program focused on better understanding and treating social competence and stress in children, adolescents, and adults with autism spectrum disorder. One of her most notable contributions has been the development of SENS Theater, a peer-mediated theater-based intervention which has contributed to significant improvement in reciprocal social communication in children with ASD. To date, Dr. Corbett has published over 70 original peer-reviewed articles in leading academic journals. Her research has been consistently funded by the National Institute of Mental Health since 2005, which includes a current multi-site clinical trial with youth with ASD and a new study of adults with ASD, both examining the impact of SENS Theater. So as you can tell, we have an incredible panel with kind of a wide array of experience and background. So I look forward to hearing from everybody. So we can start and I'll start with Aliza and then we'll kind of go backwards. I always like to be fair when I'm running a group or leading a panel. So we'll start with the question, what is your organization doing to make the arts more accessible? Thanks so much, Michelle. So I guess I'll start with the Museum, Arts and Culture Access Consortium or MAC for short. So my project, Supporting Transitions, works in multiple ways to make the arts more accessible. We're working on several employment initiatives. So we want to see more individuals with autism employed in our cultural organizations. So we're working on internship programs and Melanie is one of our internship hosts at the Guggenheim Museum. And so we have an internship program where we support young adults entering the workforce to find opportunities in cultural organizations and offer additional educational experiences to support those internships. We also do a lot of programming and training for cultural organizations on inclusive hiring practices and thinking differently about how to structure the workplace to include more individuals with autism. And we also work on recreation opportunities for individuals with autism. We're currently partnering with several cultural organizations to train direct service providers on incorporating cultural experiences into day habilitation and residential programs. So we kind of are looking at the whole picture of how a person can become involved in the arts and culture and making sure that we're making those experiences accessible. And then in my work at Learning Spring School, I'm really working on making sure that my students have the opportunity to experience the arts in all ways, whether that's creating art or attending art as an audience member. So working with different cultural partners to bring my students to experience the arts and also working to create art in the classroom. Okay, great. Melanie, same question. What is the Guggenheim doing to make the arts more accessible? Yeah, thanks, Michelle. So museums can be particularly difficult for people with sensory sensitivities and the Guggenheim is particularly difficult for people with sensory sensitivities. So our Guggenheim for All initiative is working to make high quality programs for individuals on the spectrum, but also to make organizational changes that can help mitigate some of these sensory challenges and disseminate them to the museum and cultural community. The program started in 2010 with one school partnership. We now have over 25 school partners, family programs. We have, as Elisa said, we have an internship through MAC supporting transitions and we also just started an apprenticeship program. So we're really thinking about how we can help individuals with autism have employment opportunities in the museum and cultural sector. Our school and family programs use the same strategies and techniques as all of our school and family programs, but we've added additional supports to help with some of these issues faced by kids with autism in coming to the museum that are presented by the museum environment. So our school programs happen over three sessions so the museum educators can go to the school before and really get the kids prepared for what's gonna happen in the museum. We have social narratives and information that we give out to teachers and students and families before coming to the museum so they can really prepare. And once they come to the museum, we've been working to integrate evidence-based techniques into our teaching that really help eliminate some of the barriers presented by the museum environment. So our programs use clear instructions and agendas, a little clear language for the program. We have a lot of opportunities for multimodal conversation, a lot of kinesthetic activities and a lot of hands-on art making so that it's not all conversation-based. We've been working with special ed professionals and an advisory group from the autism community to really collect these best practices and adapt them to fit the museum environment. And we're working to put all of this information together into a toolkit that will be available for free to cultural organizations who wanna start their own autism programs. We also put some things in place for museum visitors who come to visit the museum, not through our programs. So we have a social narrative for general museum visitors. We also have a sensory map that outlines where the quiet spaces are in the museum. And we had just put together a sensory backpack of items that business could pick up before entering the museum with noise-canceling headphones and fidgets, but unfortunately COVID put a little bit of a snag in that but we're hoping to reinstate that as soon as we're able. Thank you. And Larissa, can you tell us what TDF is doing to make the arts more accessible? Yes, thank you. And I do wanna mention, I'm working on two monitors so my gaze will be going up and down today. I hope it's not too distracting for people. But TDF's entire mission is all about making theater more accessible for people. And I think most people are pretty familiar with TDF's ticketing programs. We have a membership program that provides discounted tickets. We have the TKTS booths which also have discounted tickets for Broadway. And we have all kinds of educational programs that are there to try and get communities who don't typically engage with theater to start engaging with theater. But we have some really wonderful programs in our accessibility department that I don't think as many people know about. We have the accessibility membership program which provides discounted tickets to accessible performances on Broadway and off Broadway. And with those performances, we work with the production and set up open captioning, audio description, ASL interpretation. And then most recently, before the pandemic hit, we got to start doing some touch tours for folks with vision loss, which were super fun. And hopefully at some point, we can come back and start doing that again. But we also have some national programs that I don't think people really know too much about. And with those programs, we get to help fund and or train other theaters around the country and help them implement their own open caption performances or autism friendly performances. We also have a New York state-based re-granting program where we help provide funding for any kind of arts and culture organization to start offering open captioning. We also have a awesome student program where we bring a few hundred students who have vision loss and or hearing loss to Broadway about twice a year. And then of course, last but not least, TDF has our autism friendly performance program which is what I'll mostly be talking about tonight. And with that, typically pre-pandemic, we would have about six autism friendly performances a year. And for each of those performances, TDF will buy out the whole theater and then we'll start reselling those tickets to anyone who would benefit from coming to an autism friendly performance at a really reduced price. And we do a lot of different things so that we're comfortable with labeling these performances as autism friendly. So we work with really fantastic consultants, both individuals who are on the spectrum and professionals working in the field. They help us pick shows to work with and then they help us decide what sort of accommodations or modifications we might need to make to the show. And we'll work with the production to adjust any sounds, lighting, special effects that we think are not appropriate for a sensory friendly show. And then we even get to work with the actors and the theater staff and do some training with them so that they know what to expect because these aren't typical performances. The way the performance itself is run and the way the audience sort of responds to the show is different. So they get to hear a little bit about what that will be like beforehand. And then on the day of the event, we have a really fantastic group of volunteers who comes in to help us make sure that everyone's feeling really safe and comfortable throughout the whole show. And last but not least, Dr. Corbett, I think if you wanna touch upon what your lab is doing to make the arts more accessible as well as what the program that you found it is doing to make arts more accessible. Wonderful. So our program since theater, which is part of my lab, I started it back in 2009. And so we're definitely doing our part to make arts more accessible in particular theater because our participants with autism spectrum disorder actually on the stage they're becoming immersed within the theater experience. So since theater is a peer mediated theater-based program for children, adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder, it's about a 40 hour intervention. And what I mean by peer mediated, we work with individuals who are very good at social communication, most of them are actors, many are high school students, some are undergraduates and we train them about autism and our specific program. And then our participants who are also part of a research program participate in about a 40 hour intervention that culminates in the performance of a play. And so all of the participants are learning about how to improve social skills, but it's embedded within the arts, it's embedded within theater. And we think this is a wonderful way for them to work in a safe, supportive, creative environment about some of the various skills that individuals with autism spectrum disorder could improve on. So for example, reciprocal social communication, theory of mind or perspective taking and also stimulating their imagination. But they're doing it in a way that's really supportive. The theater is a wonderful place to be able to take chances and broaden our skills. But in the background is a very rigorous research program that's part of our lab. And I'm very pleased that the National Institute of Mental Health as well as other foundations have funded us all these years. It's great. And I guess we're gonna start with you now, Dr. Corbett on the next question is, and this might be a little, you can think about maybe how it impacts the larger university or kind of the larger community. What is the benefit to both kind of your organization as well as to neurodiverse individuals making art program accessible? Like what's the benefit that you see in the students that participate in your program as well as maybe their peers? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's kind of multi-level. So we'll start with the participants. I do think that they, in addition to enhancing their social skills, a lot of them really haven't thought about engaging in the arts, at least performance arts. And so many of them gives them the opportunity to kind of broaden their skills. And many of them then will go and decide they wanna be more engaged in theater and things like this. The impact that we're not measuring very well, and we need to do a better job is the impact directly on the peers that are supporting our program. Many of them have never worked with individuals with autism or developmental disabilities, but many, this experience has been quite transformative. So they might have skills in the arts, many of them are incredible actors, performers, singers, musicians, but now they're realizing they can take those gifts and really impact an individual with developmental disability. And that has been really pretty extraordinary to see those gains in them. But I also think that in another way, we are broadening our exposure to the community because our performances for COVID were for the public. They were all at no cost. And so people would come and they would be able to see individuals with autism in a really extraordinary way, performing in ways that many of them could not believe that they had these strengths and these skills and these talents that they just need an opportunity and a little bit of support and they can really shine. So I think in that way, we're helping to change the perspective of what is autism. And at least we're trying. And then in terms of disseminating our research and what we're learning about what our participants are capable of, I think we're trying our best to also disseminate that to the broader autism community, but importantly, the scientific community. And Larissa, thinking about the sensory friendly performances that TDF sponsors. How do you see those performances benefiting obviously the audience, but also benefiting the theaters that you're working with and training and the actors and staff? Yeah, so there are so many benefits. And I think first of all, we're sending this really important message that just says we see you and we value you as a theater goer. And we recognize that people are coming to our performances for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it's a family that just loves theater. Maybe there's a friend or family member who's a theater lover and wants to share that with someone else for the first time. Maybe a family had a terrible experience at a typical show on Broadway and just does not feel welcome to go there anymore. Or it's a stepping stone for someone who wants to go to theater but isn't really comfortable yet. So maybe after a few TDF shows, they'll feel comfortable going to Broadway whenever they want. Or maybe someone is just like a huge Disney fan and needs to see frozen in any format they can. And that's totally fine. In the end, all we wanna do is provide this safe space for people to come and enjoy what they love with their community. And I think that even extends to the volunteers that we work with. We have some neurodiverse volunteers who get to come join us for the day and have a really fun, positive experience working at this really large scale event on Broadway. But I think that, like you said, the programming also has this great impact on Broadway and the theater community across the country. I mentioned our national programs. We can get other people to set up their own autism-friendly performances. And as soon as they start doing that, they're helping to spread that awareness throughout their community. And that might be across the country. It might be right next door in New Jersey. It could be anywhere. And every time we do our own Broadway show, we're informing Broadway. And the staff and the actors who get to spend time with us, they get to take what they learned at our one performance but apply that to everything they do. Actors tell us all the time after one of our performances that that was their favorite performance ever because it's just so different from what they usually do and just the positive energy that's coming from the audience is so different. And ushers, I mean, once they've done an autism-friendly performance with us, they understand autism and they know how to react to situations appropriately with kindness and understanding, which is not something you'll always get from an usher at a Broadway theater. And for TDF, for our staff, they love our autism-friendly performances. It's such a big part of the whole organization at this point. We encourage any of our staff to come to the performances, to volunteer with us whenever they can because of this program. It doesn't matter if you are an educator at TDF or you work in finance or IT, you come away and understand that we do this for a reason. And there are reasons why it's been such a success and continues to happen year after year. But I do think because of our staff being so in tune with accessibility, it also encourages us to kind of reevaluate the things that we're doing to make sure we're keeping up with the times and giving the community what they actually want. And that's something that we really had to figure out during the pandemic and sort of explore and experiment with different types of programming. There will, the final question will be about how the pandemic has affected things. So Melanie, same question. How has like the Guggenheim for all benefited like the community, families, individual schools and also how has it had an impact on the larger Guggenheim museum? Yeah, so all the offerings and accommodations that we're making for neurodiverse individuals in the museum are really making it more sensory friendly for everyone, museums get crowded, they're unfamiliar and I'm sure we've all had the experience of going to a museum and wishing we knew how to get out of a crowd and where to go and sit down in a quiet spot. So by making the museum more sensory friendly through Guggenheim for all, we're really just making it sensory friendly for everyone who comes to visit. We're also really working to highlight the strengths and talents of individuals on the spectrum through our programs and raise awareness of neurodiversity as an identity group. Echoing what Glythe and Larissa just said, we're really working to create programs that highlight strengths and talents and allow our students to express themselves creatively and really give them, welcome them to the museum as a place where they feel comfortable in a home but also a place where their talents can really shine. We have a virtual family program coming up next weekend. It's led by an artist with autism, Myasia Dowdell. She works with land gallery, which is a program of the League Rehabilitation and Treatment Center which has a gallery and studio for artists with disabilities and her work is amazing and she'll be co-facilitating our virtual family program for families next weekend with one of our educators and we're super excited for the museum to highlight her as an artist and really showcase her talents. And we've also been working thanks to Alisa and supporting transitions to really help develop workplace opportunities for individuals on the spectrum. We're hosting our second neurodiverse intern who just started today and we're also highlighting an apprenticeship program and our apprentice who we've been working with since December is creating a virtual exhibition of work from the students in our Guggenheim for all program that'll be on the Guggenheim's website and be able to again highlight the work and talents of the kids in our programs. We're always working to include different voices as we develop these offerings and we wanna be sure that autistic voices are included in our program development, in our toolkit and in the museum as a whole. So this apprenticeship and internship is kind of critical to the work that we're doing. After working with our Guggenheim for all apprentice, I feel like I personally am developing better skills as a manager and that our museum staff as a whole is developing an awareness of what individuals with autism are capable of in the workplace. I saw meme the other day that said, don't do for us, do with us. And I thought that really hit home. We're trying to kind of embed that in the Guggenheim and Guggenheim for all in everything we do. And Aliza, I don't know even how many interns you've placed at this point in cultural organizations, but maybe you wanna share how you see the work that you're doing, kind of benefiting the individual on the spectrum as well as all these organizations that you're working with. And then you could also answer from one of the many other hats that you wear, but. Yeah, thank you. We've placed, I think, five to six interns a year for the past four years. So exciting and exciting to work with so many different cultural organizations. And what has also been exciting is to see how those interns have grown. I was leading a training for one of our organizations that was about to host an intern. And I put up a picture of a past intern, and they said, oh, that's our apprentice this year. And so it's just really nice to see our interns getting more opportunities and more jobs in the cultural field. And I think it's just so important for everybody to have an entry into this field to work in the arts is such a gift and such an exciting place to work. And if somebody wants to work in the arts, they should be able to work in the arts. And so whatever is needed to support that trajectory, that's what we're trying to make happen. And I think we've seen what every internship program has kind of seen is we've had interns who have really like found a career path. And then we've had interns who have said, this isn't actually what I wanna do, I wanna do something else. And that is great, because that's what an internship is all about. And we're excited when our interns have the same opportunities to explore as any intern has. So we've seen great growth in artistic careers and we've also seen people who are like, this was a great experience. I'm gonna take my skills that I've learned in this internship and use them elsewhere and both are great. And then I'm lucky that I've been through my bringing my students to Guggenheim for all. And I have a brother who has autism. And so bringing him to the TDF, Autism Friendly Performances, I've gotten to be a user at both of these organizations. So I think the benefits for anyone going to the arts is to have a transformative experience and the arts are incredibly transformative. They make you think in different ways. They give you a new way to experience the world. And so for any of my students or for my brother, I think like having that opportunity to experience the arts in a new way or the world in a new way through the arts is transformative just like it is for anybody else. And when their needs are met and when they feel comfortable, whether it's going to the Guggenheim Museum or entering a theater when their needs are met and they can feel really comfortable in that space, then they can really enjoy the artistic experience for whatever that artistic experience has to offer. So that is really, I feel like the benefit and the art. And then there are all these, the arts offer these transformative experiences for everyone and then there's so many other benefits that happen along the way, like thinking more flexibly about the world around us. I know when my students are looking at art or seeing a piece of theater, they're seeing things in a new way and they have to use their imaginations and they have to think more flexibly about the world. And so building those skills is only possible when there's great support in place and when they can feel comfortable and able to access the arts experience so that they can learn all the amazing things that you do learn when you engage with the arts. And thank you. And I think a bunch of people have hit on this that obviously COVID-19 has impacted a lot of programming especially in the arts. So I would love to take this opportunity to find out how has kind of the pandemic impacted accessibility in your program or kind of the future of accessibility. So I guess we can start with Larissa, is that okay? Sure. So there have I think been both a lot of positive and negative impacts and I'll focus on theater. Theater's been closed for over a year and it took quite a while I think for the theater world to kind of adapt to the digital landscape. Before the pandemic theater wasn't really a thing that happened online. And I think there was a lot of kind of confusion and hesitancy to put the time, the money, the effort into going digital. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like, okay, this would be like two weeks, okay, maybe a month, maybe a couple months. But as a result, eventually theater started to appear online and overall, the accommodations, like things like captioning still aren't all that common but overall, I think that having digital theater as like a normal part of our world is a good thing for accessibility. And I know that there are a lot of discussions happening right now about the future of digital theater and how to keep some of these new practices in place, which is great. I also think that the current climate and the push for more inclusion and diversity that we've been seeing has been impactful, especially for the accessibility community and has really shined a spotlight on them. There's also been this really great focus on intersectionality and I see a lot of organizations trying to view themselves and their programming through that different lens. But more specifically with TDF's programming, our autism friendly performances were 100% reliant on going physically into a theater full of people to watch a show. And obviously that like immediately stopped with the pandemic and for a while, we also weren't really sure what we should be doing and we're kind of focused on like, okay, well, we have to replicate what we've already been doing. So our first digital event that we did was just a simple talk back with some of the actors from Harry Potter, which was the last autism friendly show we had before the pandemic hit. But after that, we started kind of experimenting and doing things that were really new for us. We started doing these magic shows with this awesome magician who specializes in working with folks who have disabilities. He did some fun magic workshops for us. Our lead autism consultant, Becca Yure, put together these short little 30 minute shows online featuring illustrations and this puppet named Little B. And Little B was kind of talking about things that are going on in the world and feelings people might be having. But eventually we were kind of able to rework our program to be more like what it was in the theater. And we have been able to give out several hundred codes for Broadway HD, which is sort of like Netflix, but for Broadway shows. So families are able to stream theater online. And then we've been working with Colab Theater Group, which is awesome. And they've been hosting some workshops for us based on the shows that families have been able to watch. And then some of our people aren't really interested in doing things like workshops. So we're also doing talk backs based on the same shows. So if people are really more like theater focused, all I like is going to the theater. They can still participate in the talk backs. And it's been really surprisingly easy to get actors to say yes to doing this stuff for us. And I think that is because they've had such great experiences at our autism friendly shows and they love it. And now because we've been having such great experiences with our digital events, we're of course talking about how to continue doing this even once theaters reopen. And we checked with our autism families to make sure this is something that they'd still be interested in. And sure enough, some people did say like I really hope hybrid programming continues. So hopefully that's where we'll continue going as well. And then just thinking about employment, one other thing I've been thinking a lot about recently are just the changes that I've noticed at my job, but other places too, in terms of flexibility and just like embracing this more relaxed attitude about your work environment. I think people have realized that sitting in front of a computer in an office from nine to five is not the best option for everybody. And remote work can be just as productive if not more for some people. And even like your appearance, if I walked into the office a year and a half ago wearing sweatpants with no makeup on and my hair in a ponytail, my coworkers probably would have thought I had the flu or something, but that's what I always look like now because it's fine. It's acceptable. We don't need to have these strange ideas about what we need to be when we're going to work. So overall, I think there's been some problems, but there's also been really great things happening. Thank you. And I'm gonna have Dr. Corbett follow up on that just to hear how kind of your theater program has evolved during the pandemic. Sure. So our theater program, interestingly enough, we have a multi-site clinical trial that is at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It's also at Stony Brook in New York, near some of you, and also the University of Alabama. So our particular show at our site, literally we did the show the weekend before the shutdown. And so we were able to get through that and get through most of our kids during the post testing for our studies. So we were like, phew. Unfortunately, the other two sites were not, didn't have the same result. We had to put it on pause because we couldn't even go into the lab. We couldn't go to the theater, and that sort of thing which impacted just about everyone in every business. So as far as the research program, we've done the best we could to then regroup after it able to open up a little bit. And what we're doing now, because we have opened back up again, is that we have taken an important lesson from theater, which is improvisation. So we have done just that. And so we are working into two giant spaces rather than just one. And we go outside to sing and things like that. And we've just secured a very unconventional performance site which is gonna be on a giant patio balcony, one of our buildings at Vanderbilt. And we're extremely excited about that. And our dressing room is gonna be a conference room and things like that. So it's allowed us to continue to kind of think outside the box. And we've learned a lot from our participants. They're just thrilled to be there and to be able to once again engage with others. And we, of course, take all safety precautions and wear masks. But when we sing, we go outside and things like that. So I think we've been pretty accommodating to the best of our ability and learn from the process. In terms of other aspects of what we've done is we are researchers. So we also have been actually studying the impact of COVID on our population and our children and adolescents and looking at the impact that it's had on them as well as our typically developing peers as well. But like everybody else online, we've learned from it. We've adapted to it. We decided the in-person aspect was critical. And so we decided to go on pause until we could gather together. Melanie, you wanna share what Guggenheim for all has done? Sure. So COVID's been really hard for arts organizations in general, but I really think it forced us all to just pivot in unprecedented ways and fast. We all had to think outside of the box and being able to come together with other arts professionals and kind of troubleshoot in the beginning and still to this day has really allowed us to work from each other and work collaboratively in ways that we didn't necessarily do prior to the pandemic. We're partnering on an upcoming program with the Kansas Children's Discovery Center. They do amazing work in the autism community and we discovered that we are doing very similar things on opposite sides of the country. So to be able to connect with them and work together with our respective communities has been kind of an unexpected benefit to these kind of groups of arts professionals that are kind of coming together to figure it out. Like Larissa said, I also think it's super important that arts organizations are now thinking and talking about diversity and equity and access and inclusion and having these conversations really be in the forefront of what we're doing as opposed to the background. And I think just adding the visibility that has been added to that conversation is gonna impact accessibility in the arts in really positive ways. Our virtual teaching surprisingly has also made our programs more accessible. Once we figured it out, the response to all of our school and family programs was consistently positive. Teachers and families were not only surprised at how effective it was but how well their students responded. Our programs also used to be limited to local families who could physically come to the museum. And now our virtual programs have attendees from England and Australia and Korea. Our Guggenheim for All Apprentices in Kentucky, he zooms in and works from the museum. And just the fact that we'll be able to connect with people that autism locally and worldwide who were not able to physically visit the museum, but now they can thanks to the pandemic, I guess we could say. I also think technology has been very equalizing. And a lot of our students have more opportunities to participate in our programs through a preferred modality. When we're having these programs, our students can communicate verbally or use the chat or show a picture. And all of these modes of communication are kind of equally prioritized in the virtual space, which is something that we didn't expect, but I think is a big part of the reason that teachers and students keep coming back. And also the fact that Zoom allows students to visit the museum from the comfort of their own home, which honestly makes it much more accessible. We have a regular program participant who lived down the street from the museum for her whole life, but has never been inside because it seemed crowded and overwhelming. And she's been coming to our virtual programs for months and now she feels excited to go to the museum. So that's what we keep hearing is that now that museum has been introduced in a safe way, they feel ready to come in person in a way that they didn't before. So it's been a rough year, but there are silver linings for sure. And Aliza, I don't know if you wanna talk about supporting transitions or kind of what you've had to adapt at Learning Spring either is good. Yeah, I mean, I think for supporting transitions, it's been really helpful not to have travel as a part of our programs and be able to welcome people from all over the city and all over, we did a series of social meetups in the summer when the pandemic had really been going on for quite some time and people were feeling really isolated and had been without their regular programs for a long period of time. So we did a series of arts-based social meetups where we brought in different cultural organizations to lead in our workshop. And then we just had time to chat and talk and connect. And we had people coming in from all over to do those programs, whether they were New York-based, but riding out the pandemic elsewhere or just living elsewhere. So that was exciting to have just that kind of access. But even in terms of an internship, I think getting around New York City is stressful for anyone and taking that piece out of the equation provides some relief for some of our interns that popping onto a Zoom for an interview is so much less stressful than taking the subway for an hour and showing up after that journey. So I hope to, just like everyone has been saying, I really hope we keep a lot of these practices such as virtual interviews. I know a lot of what's been happening during this time has been things that people with disabilities have been asking for for years. Like video interviews has been something that our participants in supporting transitions have been asking for for a long time and we haven't been able to quite like make it happen. And now everybody's doing video interviews. So that's exciting to see and that's something that I really hope stays. And I think some people thrive in person and some people thrive in the virtual environment and we've just been seeing that and that I hope those virtual experiences also remain for those that do thrive in that type of space. And I think the same is true for my students. I've had students who have been thriving during this time and others who've really struggled and are really need to be back in person. And I think if we come out with anything, I think it's everybody's different and everyone has different needs and we need to make as many different options available as possible to meet all the different needs that are out there. One thing I've been blown away by is just the level of independence everyone I work with has shown in this time and it took some time to get there, like my students had some adjustment periods but it's been incredible to see them navigating their own schedules, their presumes, like they'll click on a calendar invite and come to a Zoom and that's like a work skill that is so important, that didn't exist in our curriculum before. So having those kind of opportunities for more independence has been really exciting to see and it makes me think about how am I gonna back off more when we're in person. So, yeah. Great, well, thank you all for the wonderful work that you're doing in this area and kind of for sharing your insights this evening. We have two questions from people in person and two questions that were typed in previously. I'll start with the first one is to Elisa, wondering how one can apply for the internship program and if there are any programs or organizations that can teach as well as help with the business aspect of kind of being an artist. That's a great question. Right now, Mac partners with the City University of New York for our internship program. So unfortunately, our internships specifically are not widely accessible to anybody and that's for many funding reasons and different restrictions we have around that but definitely get involved in supporting transitions. We often put out other calls for interns that we get from other organizations and if you join the Museum Arts and Culture Access Consortium mailing list, there'll be opportunities for information to get involved with supporting transitions. We're at macaccess.org and I think in terms of job training and I think so much depends on where you're located and I wish I had a clear answer but so much is state specific in terms of the services that are available but what's exciting to see is so many other arts access consortiums popping up throughout the country and I know Larissa started the Michigan one and there's one in Chicago and there's one in Philadelphia and there's just so many arts organizations that are coming together to really increase accessibility and so that's a great place to start in your areas to get in contact with the arts organizations and talk to them about what might be available and what might be possible. And then somebody else asked how do we find out more about the TDF programs geared towards the autism community? Sure, it is pretty simple. If you go to tdf.org slash autism you will find a whole bunch of information about the program and on the right hand side of that webpage there is a link to sign up for a mailing list but if anyone has trouble with that I'm also gonna type my personal email into the chat box you can always just shoot me an email and I can get you signed up and we also do have two events do you have two events coming up this weekend based on the sound of music? One is gonna be a workshop with Colab that I believe Alisa is gonna be working on and then we have a talk back with Malora Benanti on Sunday so if anyone wants to sign up for those you can just shoot me an email and I will help you out with that. So if anyone else has any questions from the audience that they would like to be answered or to hear about definitely put it in the Q&A somebody had asked this question earlier I think Dr. Corbett maybe you can answer this from like a researcher perspective somebody said that they've read an artistic talent in a child in a spectrum of places a talent for something more logical like math is there any research that shows that to actually be the case? So let me make sure I understand the question they're saying that individuals with autism may be more inclined for like math or what? So the idea that if somebody has like a skill in like an art that that would somehow replace like a more another skill. Yeah, I would generally disagree with that it's an overgeneralization. I think that just like the rest of us we have talents in different areas we have areas of strength but we have areas where we could improve upon but that doesn't mean that just because we're good at one thing over here doesn't mean now there's something missing kind of over here and that to me sounds like what that is. So but it also does highlight a really important part and that is that many individuals with autism they do have exceptional abilities in some areas not all and I think we should foster those but I'm also of the belief that we should continue to strengthen areas that maybe they have a little bit more challenge but I don't think there's it's one or the other. I hope that answers that. Great and I think our last question and this one just posted something. So somebody asked if your child is showing like a skill in the arts how do you kind of encourage and support that from your perspective? Great, are you talking to me? That could be that kind of could be open to anybody. We have several art educators. We do so I'm going to let them go ahead and have this one. So Melanie or Aliza. So if there is a parent of a child who is kind of gifted in the arts what as a parent can you be doing to foster that? Yeah I think more as many as many opportunities to engage with the arts as possible and I think you know there's it we're lucky that we're in a time where there are so many arts programs that are inclusive growing in different areas and I know there's many many in New York City but I think they're growing all over the country and I think reinforcing that there's not one way to create art or one way to experience the arts is such an important piece of it and really building that confidence and that passion without feeling like oh there's something I need to there's a correct way to do this or there's a right way to do this because in reality there is no one one way to make art so the more opportunities the better and the more freedom to explore the better. And our last question for the evening just because I do recognize that we're almost at a time somebody wanted to know how they can learn more about the virtual programming that the Guggenheim is running right now. Yeah all of our programs are on our website if you go to the Guggenheim webpage and look for Guggenheim for all it'll give you information about our upcoming events I'll also type my email in the chat and you're welcome to email me and I can tell you about things that might be a little further out that might not be on our website yet but we have family programs once a month and they're free of charge for everyone our virtual family programs and sneak preview we're planning our first in-person outdoor Guggenheim for all event for June so you heard it here first but I'll type my email in the chat if anybody wants to reach out directly. Perfect well as somebody who works very closely with several of the panelists even I learned a lot this evening I'm very excited about all the wonderful things that your organization are planning for the upcoming months so I just want to thank all of our panelists for kind of being part of tonight's discussion and for kind of the amazing work that each of you are doing. And thank you Michelle for for moderating this was really great. I should just mention everybody is a reminder that we have recorded this and we will be posting it on our YouTube channel we will also circulate it out to everyone who registered and if the panelists also want to share any information with links or websites we can include that as well so there'll be more follow-up information coming very soon and please check out our website we have a couple more programs coming up this week for autism awareness that you may find interesting it's bedforplayouts.org and thanks again to everybody the panel and everybody for tuning in have a great night