Future Museum Lab - Swissnex in San Francisco

Fellowship Program

Future Museum Lab is a fellowship program for museum professionals to refine the visitor journey, taking place in San Francisco from October 5–10, 2026.

About the Program

The Future Museum Lab includes a two day kick off in Switzerland, a lab week in San Francisco, and a year of community events and curated peer exchange designed to support knowledge transfer and implementation.

Co-organized by Swissnex in San Francisco and Max Kohler Stiftung, Future Museum Lab is a fellowship program for museum professionals working at Swiss museums who want to strengthen storytelling, visitor engagement, and interpretation by using emerging technologies. Applicants selected as fellows receive a stipend from Max Kohler Stiftung to participate.

By the end of the Lab week, each fellow or small team will have produced a working concept or prototype, plus a practical plan to test, adapt, and implement learnings within their institution. Throughout the year, they share progress with peers through community events in Switzerland, strengthening connections and shared learning across participating museums.

The Program Mission

The mission of Future Museum Lab is to provide an opportunity for museums to explore and experiment with practical approaches to storytelling, visitor engagement, and interpretation. We create a focused exchange between professionals in Switzerland and the US West Coast who act as pioneers to test, share, and scale projects inside institutions. The Lab aims to strengthen long term capacity in the field, and allow for institutional innovation by connecting people, methods, and real use cases.

Why the Bay Area

The Bay Area is known for experimentation across culture, design, and technology, with institutions that regularly pilot new forms of interpretation and visitor experience. Swissnex in San Francisco will connect Fellows with museum leaders, designers, educators, and creative technologists. In this ecosystem, we explore how museums can design participatory, accessible experiences that create meaning with audiences, while staying grounded in curatorial integrity and institutional mission.

Events

Future Museum Series: Whose Stories Get Told?
September 21, 2026
6–8:30pm · San Francisco
Registration

Contact

Please contact Lucas Hagin, Creative Industries Program Manager, for any questions.

Fellows

Julia Beyer

Art Education, Fondation Beyeler

Julia Beyer studied Cultural Studies and spent several years working as a freelance curator and educator on various interactive exhibition projects in Munich, Germany focusing on topics in science, culture, and history. From 2018 to 2022, she served as team leader in the Education & Visitor Experience department at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, where she was responsible for in-person educational programs.

Since 2022, she has been part of the Art Education team at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, focusing on creative practices across various formats and media.

Sarah Greenwood

Head of Communication, Marketing and Fundraising, MASI Lugano (Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana)

Sarah Greenwood is Head of Communication, Marketing and Fundraising at MASI Lugano, where she oversees the museum’s strategic communication, branding, audience development and fundraising activities.

Before joining MASI Lugano in 2022, she spent ten years in the same role at MUSEION in Bolzano Italy, contributing the museum’s strategic development and leading initiatives aimed at engaging younger audiences and defining institutional identity. Earlier in her career, she worked in international marketing and brand management for international FMCG companies including Dr. Schär and Loacker.

With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business and Management from the University of Manchester and Bocconi University, Milan and nearly thirty years of professional experience across the corporate and cultural sectors, her work combines strategic management expertise with a deep understanding of the cultural landscape, as well as of how museums operate and are evolving within contemporary society.

Gianni Jetzer

Director, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Gianni Jetzer is a Swiss curator and art historian and Director of Kunstmuseum St.Gallen since 2022. He began his career at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, before directing Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2001–06), where his program included the 2002 solo exhibition Frequently Asked Questions by the online activist collective etoy.

From 2006 to 2013 he directed the Swiss Institute in New York, commissioning and curating projects exploring emerging media and technology, including Jordan Wolfson’s first New York solo exhibition Untitled False Document (2008) and Jon Kessler’s immersive, app-based installation The Web (2013).

Jetzer later curated Art Basel Unlimited (2012–19) and served as Curator-at-Large at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2014–22). His curatorial practice explores experimental art and the intersections of art, technology, and society.

Ruth Kistler

Collection Database Manager, Kunsthaus Zürich

I work as a collection database manager at the Kunsthaus Zürich. I originally studied Art History and have spent the last seven years working with collection data, digital collections, and the museum's collection management system.

My work made me increasingly interested in the question of how technology can help visitors discover and access museum collections. To better understand the technical side of these challenges, I completed a degree in Computer Science alongside my museum career.

Today, my interests lie at the intersection of art, technology, and visitor experience. As part of the Future Museum Lab, I am developing MuseumMap [working title], an experimental LLM-powered tool that allows visitors to explore the Kunsthaus Zürich collection through natural language questions and create personalized tours through the museum.

Michael Koritschan

Interaction Design, Museum Rietberg

Czech Swiss dual citizen born and raised in Switzerland, he works as an Interaction Designer at Museum Rietberg Zurich, where he has conceived and implemented several playful mediation installations that blur the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds.

Previously, he served as art director in Zurich and Hamburg while maintaining an active practice as an artist and photographer; his work has been exhibited and auctioned in Germany, France, Morocco, Switzerland and the USA.

He has assisted renowned photographer Hans Feurer, interned at David LaChapelle Studio, and worked as a graphic designer for Palm Pictures in New York. He holds a BA in Visual Communication from the Basel School of Design (with a semester abroad at the Rhode Island School of Design) and an MAS in Design Direction from the Zurich University of the Arts, which included courses in UI/UX design, coding and game design.

Partners

Future Museum Lab is a collaboration between Swissnex in San Francisco and the Max Kohler Stiftung, a charitable foundation based in Zurich committed to empower people in their personal development, and to support encounters with art.