[test-page] Harvard Arts Accelerator 2026–27 Cohort (draft 5)
2026–27 Cohort
In partnership with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship, the Office for the Arts launched the Harvard Arts Accelerator to advance arts and culture. Its students create arts-focused businesses, technologies, and enterprises that bring solutions to problems in the arts and culture landscape.
Meet the 2026–27 cohort: 17 students from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, working on ten projects that range from live translated titles for student performances to custom wheelchair covers designed with young patients.
The projects
Arts Resilience Lab
About the project
Arts Resilience Lab is a proposed research-driven financial diagnostic and funding-navigation tool for postsecondary arts institutions. The project aims to help institutions identify financial vulnerabilities and connect their needs with appropriate funding and organizational strategies, while helping funders assess where their support could have the greatest long-term impact.
The project will combine interviews with arts administrators, students, artists, grantmakers, donors, and investment professionals with case studies of institutions that have closed, restructured, merged, or successfully adapted. Potential interventions include operating support, bridge funding, endowment building, restructuring, strategic partnerships, and shared services.
During the accelerator, the focus will be on co-designing and testing a prototype with arts institutions and funders through interviews, workshops, financial analysis, and visual case studies. Over time, Arts Resilience Lab could develop into a scalable platform or advisory venture that strengthens arts organizations’ financial resilience and supports more strategic capital allocation.
Team
Melinda Wang ’27 is a Harvard senior studying Economics and Theater, Dance & Media. Her experience includes investment research at Putnam Investments and Oak Hill Capital Partners and arts administration at the National Endowment for the Arts. She co-directs Harvard Ballet Company and previously led dance education programs through Harvard CityStep.
Attune
About the project
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.
Team
Kristy Chen (Harvard Medical School ’28) 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 ’29 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 ’30 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 ’27 [TBD: bio]
Harvard Music Collective
About the project
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.
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.
Team
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
About the project
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.
Team
Stella Saleh ’30 [TBD: bio]
Mosaic
About the project
All art is shaped by an endless chain of influences, but what happens if we pinpoint what they actually are? A piece of art is a Mosaic of other works. Mosaic is a user-friendly interface that allows artists to submit raw materials of their respective forms. As users, you are able to constantly discover the raw materials of others and add to them. Users whose works are popular within the interface are connected to industry players. You meet like-minded creatives. All creative elements are credited. You create a Mosaic. We advance your career.
Team
Polina Strela ’30 is an award-winning pianist from New York City who has appeared on NPR’s From the Top, performed internationally and starred with various orchestras as a soloist. She studies Statistics and Music and is passionate about the intersection between data analysis and creativity. At Harvard, she works as a Research Assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society housed in the Harvard Law School, focusing on the legal side of Music and AI. She also serves as an executive board member of the Mix, Harvard’s music industry club.
Riff
About the project
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.
Team
Noah Gilligan ’29, 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 ’29, 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.
Sipër
About the project
Sipër (“Above” in Albanian) is a student translator collective that writes live titles and captions for performances in Cambridge and Boston, beginning with student productions. Its translators work from each script, attend rehearsals to learn the performers’ timing, and display the titles live, line by line, as the show unfolds.
A performance reaches only the people who understand its language. In Boston and Cambridge, more than a third of residents speak a language other than English at home. A visiting parent, a neighbor, or a classmate who learned English as a second language should be able to follow a play, a reading, or a concert as fully as anyone else in the room.
Sipër displays its titles above the stage, where surtitles sit in an opera house, or on each viewer’s phone, in the language that the viewer chooses. English captions serve deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
Team
Erlisa Demneri ’27 is a writer and translator from Albania, and a Harvard senior studying History and Literature and Psychology, with a secondary in Translation Studies. She interns at the Woodberry Poetry Room and Harvard Review, works as a Radcliffe Research Partner, and is the Office for the Arts’ creative writing ambassador. The Weatherhead Center and Center for European Studies have funded her research on oral traditions and epic poetry.
[TBD: project name]
About the project
Imagine your favorite artist, whose music you listen to day and night, is coming to your hometown. You’re beyond excited—until tickets sell out on official websites within seconds, leaving only overpriced resale options.
[NAME UNKNOWN] is reimagining the ticket-buying experience by rewarding fans for their listening habits. Think Spotify Wrapped, but with real perks: if you’re among an artist’s top listeners, you get priority access to concert tickets! Instead of letting bots and scalpers snatch up VIP seats, we want to put true fans in the front row—singing along to every song, cheering on their favorite artist, and making unforgettable memories with other like-minded audience members.
Team
Sophie Tung ’29 is a Harvard sophomore studying statistics and art history. She grew up in Hong Kong and speaks three Chinese dialects. On campus, she is a violinist in the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra and an arts staff writer for the Harvard Crimson. She dreams of restoring art and growing flowers in Europe some day.
Wheels of Art
About the project
What if your wheelchair could still take you 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.
We’re building a growing gallery of young lives represented with color, creativity, and pride.
Team
Matondo Mihalache ’29 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.
[TBD: project name]
About the project
[TBD: project summary]
Team
Zakiriya Gladney ’27 [TBD: bio]
Andrew Kang ’27 [TBD: bio]
Louis Belanger ’27 [TBD: bio]