Harvard Arts Accelerator 2026–27 Cohort

What if asking for help were understood as part of excellence, rather than a departure from it?

Attune is a reciprocal initiative between the performing arts and medicine, exploring caregiving in cultures where high-pressure demands and the pursuit of excellence can overshadow an understanding of care.

Dancers and musicians are trained to persist through pain, as the body is bound to both identity and livelihood. Clinicians work within institutional pressures that leave little room to attend to the person behind the diagnosis. In both fields, unspoken norms shape which struggles may be voiced.

Attune brings artists and clinicians together as equal partners, recognizing in both a shared discipline of listening, fine-tuning, and embodied awareness. Through music, movement, and facilitated dialogue, clinicians come to understand the body as artists know it, while artists engage with medicine around injury, recovery, and help-seeking on their own terms.

Beginning in Boston, Attune draws on Harvard Medical School, Boston Ballet, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Harvard's student dance community.

We're cultivating cultures of care in which wellbeing is not a cost of excellence, but the foundation that sustains it.

Kristy Chen is a Harvard Medical School Media, Medicine, Health student and New England Conservatory–trained violinist whose artistry is devoted to the intersection of music and healthcare. Her international performance career has led to stages such as Carnegie Hall and the residence of the President of Iceland. An active collaborator with Boston Ballet artists, including the debut of a recent world premiere, she is also currently a member of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra—the orchestra of Boston's medical community.

Kaitlyn Cao is a sophomore at Harvard College studying Applied Math and Statistics. She is the current co-publicity chair for Harvard Ballet Company and a conference director for Harvard Undergraduate Association for U.S. Cross-Cultural Relations. She hopes to pursue medical school while maintaining her artistic pursuits.

Ella Tang is a freshman at Harvard College looking to potentially concentrate in Psychology, English, and an Educational Studies Secondary. She’s enjoyed doing creative writing and participating in writing competitions throughout the years and is currently a First-Year Representative for the Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective. She’s also a member of the Harvard Undergraduate Global Education Movement and the Asian American Dance Troupe. She’s very passionate about the arts and creativity and how they intersect with society and early childhood education.

JaKayla Harris is a senior at Harvard College studying physics and neuroscience. She is an avid dancer on campus where she has directed, choreographed, and performed with groups such as the Harvard Contemporary Collective, Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys, Eleganza, and Harvard Tap Company. She hopes to use both creative and analytical approaches to explore movement and the human condition.

Dr. Eron Friedlaender, MD, MPH, is an attending physician in pediatric emergency medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and an MS candidate in Media, Medicine, and Health at HMS. Dedicated to the care of autistic youth and neuroinclusive design, she is a founding member of MIXdesign and a board member of the Institute for Human Centered Design.

Dr. Miko Fogarty, DPM, is a fourth-year foot and ankle surgical resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center / Harvard Medical School. Before medicine, she was an award-winning professional ballerina with Birmingham Royal Ballet, a Gold Medalist at the Moscow International Ballet Competition, and one of the young dancers followed in the documentary First Position.

Adam Zhang is an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School, currently completing the Harvard-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship at Cambridge Health Alliance. A Yale College graduate in Cognitive Science, he is also a violinist and pianist with a passion for music and the medical humanities.

Are you an independent artist seeking to record your music? A student band looking for gigs on campus? A housing committee looking for musicians for your house formal? A busy college student searching for a pit orchestra to dust off that flute? You have a clear artistic vision, but like so many on campus, you lack the resources, connections, and opportunities necessary to make your artistic dreams a reality.

Musical entities on Harvard’s campus, including individuals, artists, bands, ensembles, venues, and more, frequently operate unaware of one another and unable to allocate the time and organization necessary to properly access the resources, personnel, and spaces needed to bring their projects to fruition.

Our user-friendly database and website will be a hub for all musically-inclined Harvard affiliates to post and respond to opportunities, locate resources, and more, with no barriers to entry. It will make communication between musical entities on campus simple and effective, finding the right band for the right gig, the right musician for the right part, and the right producer for the right artist, keeping people from depending on word of mouth to make their visions a reality.

Arianna Martinez Cavero ‘28 is a fiddle player and jazz violinist in the Harvard-Berklee joint-studies program hailing from Massachusetts. At Berklee, she studies Celtic and old-time fiddle, and has recently begun to explore music business. At Harvard, she studies social studies and is working on her senior thesis.

Eli Shatney Mansur ‘28 is a multi-instrumentalist and producer from Vermont. He has worked as a studio engineer, a church organist, and a gigging musician in the Cape Breton trio High Drive. At Harvard, he studies theoretical physics and music and manages the community and facilities of the SOCH Studio.

Jammy is how musicians find each other, and how everyone else finds out what’s on. Set a distance — three miles, seven, fifteen — and see only what’s close enough to matter. Players get matched on complementary instruments: tell it you play trumpet and it stops showing you other trumpet players, and starts showing you the drummer looking for horns. Every profile has the option to upload recordings, so you hear someone before you meet them. If you’d rather just listen in person, Jammy shows you the gigs happening near you this week, posted by the bands playing them. Free, and built in Boston. The app has features that include direct messaging and a “radio” page where musicians can listen to the music of any artist who has uploaded their tracks to Jammy.

Stella Saleh is a first year engineering student at Harvard. An avid musician, Stella plays trumpet and piano in both jazz and classical settings. She grew up playing music on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. The island has a vibrant music community but she noticed it could be difficult for players to join if they didn’t have a personal connection. With Jammy, Stella hopes to create a virtual meeting place for musicians, lowering the barriers to entry into community music scenes.

Every musician has an idea nobody has heard, but if amateur music is that valuable, why is almost none of it rewarded? And if social media is so expressive, why is it hiding the art?

Riff is an audio-only platform for musicians to share and collaborate on short musical ideas. Riff is a compelling alternative to addictive and unproductive social media and a way for musicians to reap the value of their work.

Noah Gilligan, founder of Riff, is a Harvard sophomore studying English on a premedical track. A lifelong pianist and guitarist, he plays in a campus band and is a proctor for the First-Year Arts Program. He also plays on the varsity tennis team at Harvard.

Lincoln Solomon, co-founder of Riff, is a Harvard neuroscience concentrator and the drummer in a campus band alongside Noah. He is also a member of Harvard’s On Thin Ice, a musical improv group.

What if your wheelchair could still take wherever you want to go—and show the world a little more of who you are along the way?

Wheels of Art is an art therapy program that pairs Harvard student artists and children using mobility devices, to customize their wheelchairs.

It is a hospital-integrated, patient-centered arts program that brings identity, creativity, and positive visibility into the experience of pediatric patients who use wheelchairs.

The goal is to help children feel seen as whole people with style, taste, and dreams—not merely defined by clinical equipment.

The program is designed to be a true collaboration between the artist and child over the course of a semester. Each set of covers is designed with the child's story, preferences, and imagination at the center. The Harvard student artist’s design becomes part of what the child sees and uses everyday.

Wheels of Art is intentionally scoped as a high-impact, low burden program that can run alongside standard hospital programming and school schedules—without asking families to take on additional logistical work.

We’re building a growing gallery of young lives represented with color, creativity, and pride.

Matondo Mihalache is a sophomore concentrating in Neuroscience and East Asian Studies. He leads an original tour of the Harvard Art Museums collections based on the interplay between brain science and movement, and competes nationally in ballroom dance competitions. Wheels of Art is an attempt to frame mobility within a deeper reflection about reformed identity in the experience of care.