MCN 2026

What does it mean to build museum digital experiences and storytelling with a community, rather than for one?

Digital storytelling in museums has long promised connection to audiences, to communities, to collections. But too often digital becomes a delivery mechanism for the museum's existing narrative. This panel argues for something harder and more necessary. Museums are experiencing a paradigm shift; audiences have more choices, more skepticism, and less patience for institutional voice, and polarizing political and social challenges have directly impacted and had a chilling effect on the field’s efforts to address whose stories are being told. This panel looks at how three museums across the country respond using digital storytelling, challenging the power balance between audiences and museums, and addressing how and where audiences and media take up space within the museum. 

These projects aim to decenter the museum’s perspective and prioritize stories and experiences that don’t orbit the object, the canon, or the curatorial imperative, but instead emerge from lived experience. They are not just a way to deliver interpretation, but show new ways to listen first, follow the lead of communities, and truly build trust that leads to shared authorship.

The MFA Boston's reimagined 18th-century galleries, opening June 2026 in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of American Independence, feature an immersive, multi-layered in-gallery audio experience designed in close collaboration with a community advisory group. 

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's A Frame of Mind podcast, uses the museum's collection as a lens to examine belonging, identity, race, and community memory, using audio storytelling to be genuinely accountable to a moment and to its city.

The Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum’s video roundtable featuring Jewish and Christian spiritual leaders and thinkers welcomes visitors to the exhibition "The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt". It models a way to explore the continued relevance of the biblical story of Esther here and now, when Jewish communities in the US are fractured and Esther has become a tool of Christian nationalism.

These digital experiences engage community members as co-authors: shaping both story frameworks and the experience design. Together they ask: what does building trust and connection actually require? How do we know when it's working, not by our metrics, but by theirs? And how do we build digital experiences that translate something true about a community's relationship to culture, history, and place?

These questions sit at the core of what digital storytelling is trying to do and what has become increasingly challenging in the wake of the current political climate. Together, the panelists will explore the structural, editorial, and ethical choices that make community-driven digital storytelling and experience design work, and where the gaps, tensions, and open questions still live.