Connected Audience Conference 2022

Partners:

The Conference will be virtual and take place from 27 – 29 April 2022.

To ensure that attendees from the Americas can participate, all presentations and interactive sessions will be taking place during the

1pm - 6pm CEST time frame (7am - 12pm EDT).

Exploring the Evidence for Cultural Institutions' Relevance

The Connected Audience Conference occurs every two years and convenes cultural professionals, researchers, and policymakers to engage in discussion about how to build and engage audiences in cultural organizations (museums, theatres, symphonies, etc.). In the 21st century, successful cultural institutions need to be open spaces, acting as places and partners for learning, social cohesion and well-being in a changing world. We need to find new ways to ensure a strong audience focus in the cultural sector, and for this approach to be considered a key to an institution’s culture.

To explore these challenges the Institute für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung in collaboration with the Institute for Learning Innovation (USA) brings together experts, researchers, and practitioners from the global cultural sector for discussion and exchange.

The Connected Audience Conference 2022 will address the pressing issue of Public Value and Relevance. We invite you to join your colleagues from around the world to explore the role that cultural organizations can, do, and should play in our communities.

Conference Design

The international biennial conference will provide inspiring discussions and productive interactions between its various participants and facilitators. This approach offers a role model of our vision of how cultural organizations can connect with their multiple audiences. There will be a minimum of talking heads and a maximum of participant engagement. We seek to create a facilitating and stimulating atmosphere with a strong dialogical approach. Participants will gain relevant experiences and insight for their professional practice.

The main goal of the conference is to examine how audience research and evaluation can support er cultural institutions in gaining a greater understanding of their audiences. By using these tools, institutions will be able to increase participation and better inform their strategic development and overall cultural practice.

About us

Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung | IKTf

The Institute for Research on Cultural Participation (IKTf) investigates the conditions that foster cultural participation by providing policy makers, funders and practitioners in the cultural sector with the comprehensive knowledge they need to lead in the twenty-first century. IKTf conducts scientific studies on visitors and non-visitors of cultural offerings. The Institute is also responsible for guaranteeing the scientific quality of the Berlin visitor research system KulMon (KulturMonitoring). IKTf’s research also measures the factors that support cultural organizations and their funders build broad and diverse participation.

www.iktf.berlin

Institute for Learning Innovation

The Institute for Learning Innovation is a non-profit that works collaboratively with organizations and communities around the globe to expand the way that people think about learning. Their research, and the application of those findings to everyday learning, are designed to broaden who has access to learning, expand where and when people learn, and extend the basic understanding of how people learn across their lifespan.

www.instituteforlearninginnovation.org

Prof. Dr. Timo Meynhardt

Prof. Dr. Timo Meynhardt, is the Dr. Arend Oetker Chair of Business Psychology and Leadership at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management as well as the Director of the Center for Leadership and Values in Society at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Prof. Meynhardt’s research focus is the field of public value and the application of the concept in business and administration. He has developed a Public Value Scorecard to measure public value creation along five dimensions. He brings important research and ideas from outside the cultural field to our discussion.

Lori Fogarty

Lori Fogarty, is the Director and CEO of the Oakland Museum of California, a museum which has a strong commitment to social impact and creating social cohesion in its city. The Oakland Museum was born in 1969 in the shadow of racial division and protest in one of the most diverse cities in the world. Over the past decade, the museum has worked to diversify its board, staff, and audience, and have begun to measure the impact it is having on the well-being of its community; moving beyond traditional measures of attendance and financial benchmarks.

Dr. John H. Falk

Dr. John H. Falk, is Executive Director of the Institute for Learning Innovation and Sea Grant Professor Emeritus of Free-Choice Learning at Oregon State University. The author of over two-dozen books in the areas of learning, ecology and education, his newest book, The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being (Fall, 2021), specifically addresses the issues of relevance and value. Falk is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the Council of Scientific Society President’s Award for Educational Research and the John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership by the American Alliance of Museums.

Dr. Vera Allmanritter

Dr. Vera Allmanritter, is a political scientist and cultural manager. She is the Director of the Institute for Research on Cultural Participation (IKTf), which she founded in 2020 as part of Berlin’s Foundation for Cultural Further Education and Cultural Advice. In this role she researches and publishes on multiple topics strongly related to public value, including cultural participation, audience research, audience development, cultural management, cultural marketing, and empirical research methods. She is the author of Measuring up: Ways of capturing social value and more intangible outcomes and other related articles.

Agnes Aljas

(Estonia National Museum, Tartu/Estonia)

Agnes is a researcher and curator who has been working with contemporary collecting and visitor studies at the Estonian National Museum. She has been part of the Museum’s communication research group for more than 10 years. Last year’s research interests have been related to museum impact, connected also to two EU-funded museum impact-related projects: MOI! Museums of Impact project (2020-2022) and Me-Mind. Museums and Events – Measuring Impact on local eNvironment with Data analytics (2021-2022). She is currently chair of ICOM Estonia, board member of ICOM ICME and member of EMYA jury.

Annalisa Banzi PhD

(Centro Studi sulla Storia del Pensiero Biomedico, Milan/Italy)

Annalisa Banzi is an art historian and researcher at CESPEB-Bicocca University (Milan, Italy) with a Ph.D. in psychology applied to museum studies. She has an interdisciplinary specialisation in museum studies, psychology, and neuroscience which aims to improve the dissemination of museum contents and to develop visitors’ mental wellbeing and satisfaction.

Martin Brandt Djupdræt

(Den Gamle By and Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen/Denmark)

Martin is Chief Curator at Den Gamle By (The Old Town), Denmark’s largest open-air museum and is also an industrial Ph.D. fellow at Copenhagen Business School investigating how to develop new ways of measuring the value of museum by looking at the museums ability to support and challenge the visitors’ understanding of their own identity.

Alessio del Bue

(Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa/Italy)

Alessio is a senior researcher at the head of the PAVIS (Pattern Analysis and computer VISion) research line of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). His current research interests are related to Artificial Intelligence for the automatic interpretation of three-dimensional scenes and human behavior from multimodal sources (images, video, audio). Dr. Del Bue is the coordinator of the European H2020 MEMEX project for the use of Artificial Intelligence to promote the social inclusion of communities at risk of exclusion.

Elisabeth Caesar

(SPECTYOU AG, Bern/Switzerland)

For more than 10 years Elisabeth has been working as a theater artist in Switzerland and Germany. She has been living in Germany and Switzerland since 2009. She loves to bring management and art together, worked as a director (Theater Basel) and then successfully completed her studies in directing in Bern. Among other things, she worked as a dramaturg at the Stadttheater Bern and directed the fourfold cross-disciplinary SKILT Festival until 2016. In 2018, Elisabeth founded SPECTYOU, by now the largest streaming platform for theater, dance and performance in the German-speaking countries.

Dr. Gina Emerson

(Consulting researcher, project manager and curator, Berlin/Germany)

Gina is a Research Associate on the collaborative research project ‘Ein nachhaltiger Kulturauftrag für Musik – ein neuer Aspekt orchestraler Exzellenz’ ('A sustainable cultural mission for music - a new aspect of orchestral excellence'), a joint initiative by the IASS Potsdam and the Kammerakademie Potsdam. Her doctoral thesis, “Between the ‘Experimental’ and the ‘Accessible’: Investigating the Audience Experience of Contemporary Classical Music) (Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hamburg/Germany 2020), offers a multidimensional view of the audience experience of newly composed music and was produced in collaboration with the Ulysses Network for contemporary music. Her research interests include audience experience and cultural participation and their connections to sustainability, as well as the reception of contemporary music and new music technologies.

Katharina Fendius

(Central and Regional Library, Berlin/Germany)

Katharina studied cultural theory, journalism and communication sciences in Berlin. After her scientific traineeship at the Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin, she led the revision of the permanent exhibition and the conception und realisation of the newly created Future Lab. From May 2017 to May 2021, she was responsible for projects of the Deputy Director General of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and from 2019, she led the sub-project „(De-) Coding Culture – Cultural Competence in the Digital Space“ within the joint project museum4punkt0. Since June 2021, she has been the head of the Berlin Collections at the Central and Regional Library Berlin.

Cristina Da Milano

(ECCOM, Rome/Italy)

Cristina is an archaeologist specialized in research in the fields of museum education and communication, with a particular focus on the topics of lifelong learning and culture as a tool for social integration. She has published numerous contributions in specialized magazines and collective volumes and regularly teaches in postgraduate courses. She is dedicated to planning and research on the role of culture as an instrument of social integration at the national and international levels. She has participated and been responsible for numerous projects funded by the European programs Lifelong Learning Program, Erasmus+, Creative Europe and Horizon Europe 2020, with a special focus on the themes of the development of intercultural skills among museum operators, new technologies for cultural mediation, access to culture and audience development. She is president of ECCOM Associazione, Vice-President and board member of CAE-Culture Action Europe and member of the Board of Teatro di Roma since 2017.

Dina Dionísio

(Interactive Technologies Institute & IST-ID / Portugal)

Dina Dionísio is a Research Assistant at Interactive Technologies Institute & IST-ID (Portugal). Dina has vast experience working with multidisciplinary teams in several EU research projects. For over six years, operating in the interdisciplinary domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), she specified her expertise in User Research and User Experience design, focusing on the user needs and understanding human behaviour and development through social and ethical analyses of how people adapt and use technology. She’s a team member of the European H2020 MEMEX project, supporting the development team in the design and co-design activities of the project. She’s responsible for leading evaluations of the user studies and analyzing data. She also bridges the communication between technical and social Partners of the Consortium.

Dr. Bernd Holtwick

(DASA Arbeitswelt Ausstellung, Dortmund/Germany)

Bernd was born in 1968 and studied History, German and Sociology at the University of Bielefeld from 1989 to 1995. 1999 he achieved his Doctoral degree in Modern German History with Prof. Hans-Ulrich Wehler as adviser. From 2000 to 2005 Bernd worked as a scientific employee at “Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg” (Historical Museum Baden-Wuerttemberg) in Stuttgart. He was responsible for cultural affairs in the county of Biberach from 2006 to 2010, especially for the open-air museum Kürnbach. In 2011 he entered DASA working world exhibition as assistant director and head of exhibitions. As such he is responsible for the ongoing modernization of the permanent exhibition and the production of travelling exhibitions.

Inès Martorell

(Dédale / France)

Inès has been project manager at Dédale since July 2020. She graduated in urban planning and development from the Paris School of Urban Planning (EUP) and specialized in the issue of new urban uses and citizen participation following her professional experience in urban and architectural programming. Her main fields of intervention are: Definition of strategies for citizen participation and consultation/co-construction (participatory workshops, workshops, shared diagnoses) in France and in the framework of European projects (Erasmus+, Horizon Europe...); Definition and implementation of programmatic strategies at the scale of projects and neighborhoods; Design and implementation of innovative participatory tools.

Dr. Katerina Mavromichali

(Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Central Archaeological Council and Museums Council, Athens/Greece)

Katerina is an archaeologist-museologist, outreach engagement coordinator working with children, young people and families in art therapy, promoting Museums, Health & Wellbeing initiatives. Katerina has a rich experience in the Greek cultural sector and is an officer of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in the newly formed interdisciplinary team working on Cultural Prescribing. In 2018 she launched 'Outreach', a Social Programme for the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki|MOMus Modern, based on innovative applications of Art Therapy in Museums & in Health. Her current research has a special focus on cultural policies, art therapy, health humanities, socially-engaged practice in museums, and the ways culture can contribute to the efficiency of learning and creative public health, as well as its role in social change, urban regeneration and sustainability. She advocates a museology of care and aspires to encourage synergies, interaction and co-creation.

Ivo Oosterbeek

(Mapa das Ideias | MDI, Lisboa/Portugal)

He has a degree in Graphic Arts, a Master in Prehistoric Archaeology and a Master in Science Communication, is a member of the Terra e Memória Institute. He is the project officer for the MEMEX project at Mapa das Ideias (a Portuguese privately-owned company dedicated to the relationship between museums, audiences and communities), organizing the implementation of pilot activities in the Lisbon area.

Josefine Otte

(museum4punkt0, Berlin/Germany)

Josefine Otte studied art history, history, art sciences and art technology in Münster and Berlin. After her studies she took over the management of the Berlin Story Museum in the air-raid shelter at Anhalter Station and worked on Content Management for an e-commerce start-up. Since 2018 she is part of the sub-project „(De-) Coding Culture“ at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in the joint project museum4punkt0. Within the project she took over the coordination of the project pillar visitor orientation and visitor research.

Dr. Pille Runnel

(Estonia National Museum, Tartu/Estonia)

Pille is the Research director of the Estonian National Museum. Her research is focused on museum communication and audience studies. She is responsible for the research agenda of the Estonian National Museum and was supervising the production of new research-based permanent exhibitions of the Museum (which opened in 2016). She is a member of CUDAN (Cultural Data Analytics) advisory board, Tallinn University, head of the expert board for the National Research Contest for Young Scholars in Estonia and member of the expert panel for the European Heritage Label (European Commission).

Ivana Scharf

(Create Encounter, Berlin/Germany)

Ivana is consultant, author and expert for outreach in museums. She has more than 20 years of professional practice and experience in management positions. As founder and managing director of create encounter, she designs transformative encounters using the framework of Theory U, body-based practices of Social Presencing Theater and systemic constellation work to support personal and collective transformation processes. At the Jewish Museum Berlin, she set up the first outreach department of a German museum. With MUTIK, she developed nationwide network projects in the field of cultural education. Her latest project is museumhub.de a platform for innovators in the museum world supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

Melissa Smith

(Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario/Canada)

Melissa is the Assistant Curator of Access and Learning at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her responsibilities include inclusive public programs for adults and accessibility advocacy. Motivated by a sustained commitment to exploring the unique relationship between art and audiences, Smith was awarded the Royal Ontario Museum Visitor Engagement Award in 2014 and one of Smith’s AGO programs was awarded the 2016 People’s Choice for Quality Improvement by the City of Toronto Long Term Care Homes and Services. She holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Western University and a Masters of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. She is also a Sessional Instructor in the Inclusive Design Graduate Program at OCADU and sits on the Board of Directors at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre.

Oliver Tewes-Schünzel

(Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung/Institute for Research on Cultural Participation, Berlin/Germany)

Oliver is a sociologist. Since 2020, he has been a research associate at the Institute for Research on Cultural Participation (IKTf) at the Stiftung für kulturelle Weiterbildung und Kulturberatung in Berlin, working on issues of cultural participation from a cultural sociological perspective. Since 2015, he has been working on his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin on the topic of "Milieus and Lifestyles in Postmigrant Society." In 2019, he was the initiator and co-editor of the anthology "Der soziale Raum der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft".

Jelena Tšekulajeva

(Estonia Health Museum, Tallinn/Estonia)

Jelena has worked in multiple museums, largely in education and community engagement. In response to her work with the Creative Europe project “Agents of Change: Mediating Minorities“ her research has focused on the working definition of mediation and examined education processes as methods to open dialogue with museum visitors. Her work in this area was recently incorporated into a significant exhibition that was designed to be participatory for visitors, while providing meaningful research for the museum.

Dr. David Ucko

(Museums+more, Washington/USA)

David has devoted his career to advancing informal STEM learning. At the National Science Foundation, he led Informal Science Education and the Division of Research on Learning in Formal & Informal Settings. He was founding president, Science City at Union Station; deputy director, California Museum of Science & Industry; vice president, Museum of Science & Industry; and served on the National Museum Services Board (IMLS) and Visitor Studies Association board. Ucko holds a B.A. from Columbia and Ph.D. from M.I.T., has over 75 publications, and is a AAAS Fellow. He continues to serve the field as a consultant.

Keynotes & Sessions

As of April 25, 2022

Keynotes: Prof. Dr. Timo Meynhardt Lori Fogarty Dr. John H. Falk Dr. Vera Allmanritter

Confirmed Presentations & Sessions: Engaging Senior Audiences in Meaningful Ways Cultural experiences Impact on Personal Connection How do online Theater Experiences contribute to or distract from Public Value and Relevance? Museums in Transition - an Empirical Study of (non) Visitor Relationships Measuring Museum Relevance and Impact: Estonian Museum examples Measuring the Visitors' Perception of the Value of Museum Participation Digital transformation for social inclusion, mediation, and research: the example of the MEMEX Moving towards future Understanding Non-Visitors Relevancy and cultural participation through the lens of audience experience and lifestyle The relevance of the systematic application of psychology and neuroscience in order to understand your visitors. How to develop a brain-friendly museum.