Where art, innovation, and healing converge to create a new kind of medical experience.
A Real Start
Experience Museo | Season 2026–27 | Applications open now, closing September 7, 2026, at 12 pm CDT
Training makes you technically good and leaves you to work out what makes you you.
We know you have been left in the dark about how to show who you are.
The Echoes of Memory Fellowship pays you, gives you two mentors, one in music and one in cultural work, and a season where you shape work of your own and show it, alongside artists, clinicians and the people who come, inside a community of practice that stays after the season closes.
You leave with work that could only be yours, hours you can show, and people who keep working with you.
We are choosing four fellows in Houston: three musicians and one digital storyteller. Every place is paid, and applying is free.
Apply as a musician
Apply as a digital storyteller
Echoes of Memory. The season. It runs September to May, and it is about what music, story, and presence do for the way we remember, and what they give people who are carrying something. Four themes run through it, in this order: connection, belonging, memory, hope. The season connects, then belongs, then remembers together, and hope is what remembering together gives back.
Healing through the arts. The field we work in. It has a name—arts in health—and decades of research behind it. At Experience Museo, we are exploring what healing through the arts means, together with the artists, fellows, and communities we work with. This season that work sits with the fellows and the artists in residence. Later seasons open it to the practices in the building, each in their own field.
Experience Museo. The people behind these fellowships. Experience Museo is the cultural life of Museo, a medical building in Houston’s Museum District. Concerts, workshops, movement, art, and conversation. The building is devoted to healing. The season is open to anyone in the city. A place to belong.
Museo. The building where it all happens. Museo is a medical building in Houston’s Museum District, built on the belief that where you are cared for is part of the care. A place to heal.
This is living art. We make our season during the year. Elsewhere a season is announced complete, and you choose which events to attend. We spend ours making art, researching together, telling stories, and asking questions, and we invite you in as it grows.
Everything runs in parallel. Workshops, talks, research, and rehearsal run alongside each other all year, and each concert shows what the season has made so far.
The season runs September to May. It opens with a concert on September 12, moves through salons, workshops, and gatherings across the year, and closes with Echoes of Memory: A Festival of Voices on May 1. Fellows begin working in October and stay through to the end. The people in it are what make it: three young musicians, three artists in residence, one storyteller-in-training alongside our chief storyteller, and the audiences who keep coming back. That is what we mean by a community of practice, and it does not break up when the season closes.
This is our first season, and what you make in it becomes part of the answer.
At Epidaurus, the Greek healing sanctuary held a hospital, baths, a library, sports grounds, and one of the great theaters of the Greek world, all inside one site. UNESCO calls it the earliest organized sanatorium and lists the theater among the sanctuary’s functions. Asclepius, the god of medicine, was the son of Apollo, who held both music and healing.
Care and culture shared an address for centuries. Somewhere after that we separated them. Experience Museo puts them back in one building, on the belief that being among other people is part of how anyone heals.
That belief is the thing we are asking you to work on with us. It is not settled. We are looking for fellows who will argue with it.
One fellowship, two tracks, which run alongside each other. The fellows in them work together.
Musician track
• Three fellows, high-school age and up, about fifteen years and older
• Any instrument, any voice
• You perform twice, we record you, and the recordings are yours
• About two hours a week, plus rehearsals before each performance
Digital storyteller track
• One fellow, eighteen or older
• Any storytelling background: film, video, writing, spoken word, photography, audio
• You learn the craft, train as a facilitator, and lead paid community workshops
• Training blocks across the season, plus presence at everything we make
Read the tab for the track that is yours. If both speak to you, apply to the one you would give the year to.
Applying is free. Always. If money, distance, or anything else is standing in your way, tell us. We will help you find a way in.
You should live in the Houston area. Most of the season runs online. Museo hosts the in-person sessions and performances, in the Museum District, so you take part both ways throughout the year.
Both tracks are paid, and both are chosen in September, musicians by audition and the storyteller by interview. Both give you two mentors, one in your own art form and one in cultural work, and a written record of your hours, the settings you worked in, and the people you worked with. In this field, that record is the credential, and almost no program of our size provides one.
Three artists in residence carry the season: Eleni Calenos, Greek soprano; Teruhiko Toda, Japanese pianist and conductor; and Benjamín Serur, Venezuelan cellist.
Horten Barrios-Gómez created Experience Museo and leads the storytelling work. Raina Schnider coordinates the program.
Applications close September 7, 2026, at 12 pm CDT.
Apply as a musician
Apply as a digital storyteller
Questions? Write to us at info@experiencemuseo.com.
Where art, innovation, and healing converge to create a new kind of medical experience.
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