{"id":334587,"date":"2026-03-17T21:24:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T21:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/334587\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T21:24:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T21:24:18","slug":"meet-the-woman-who-made-museums-more-accessible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/334587\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Woman Who Made Museums More Accessible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feature<\/a><\/p>\n

The first head of Accessible Programs at the National Gallery of Art tells us about her path and the future of museum accessibility. <\/p>\n


\n \"Emma
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Meet
\n Lorena Bradford at the National Gallery of Art in 2025 (all photos Emma Cieslik\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON, DC \u2014\u00a0Lorena Bradford set out to be a speech-language pathologist, but she fell in love with art history, going on to earn a PhD in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish print-making. It would not be until 2010, however \u2014 two years after she started working as an educator at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC \u2014 that she learned about arts accessibility, when she attended her first Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) Conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the time, she was “confronting my own assumption that speaking equals engagement,\u201d Bradford said over Zoom in January. As more autistic children were visiting galleries as part of school programming, she began asking questions about creating programs intentionally tailored for disabled students and adults. Soon after, she was hired as the first head of Accessible Programs at the NGA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many other museums lump together reasonable accommodations for patrons and staff along with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance into one person\u2019s job description, but Bradford was able to focus on tailoring programs to patrons\u2019 needs and wants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a sub-department of one,\u201d she joked.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lorena Bradford at the National Gallery of Art in 2025<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, she started a monthly tour in American Sign Language led by deaf guides, alongside a program for individuals with memory loss and their caregivers called Just Us, which ran from 2017 to 2024. She also established a program that brought Georgetown medical students into the gallery to learn skills that would enhance the care they provide, including observation, communication, compassion, and perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But one of her biggest endeavors was the Short Description Project. Many museums, including the National Gallery of Art, had recorded verbal descriptions of art for in-person patrons, but this was a different level of accessibility. \u201cOne of the things that\u2019s really amazing is that you put everything online,\u201d Bradford explained. \u201cThere\u2019s no paywall and that\u2019s a huge part of accessibility, getting to access information online.\u201d<\/p>\n

Begun during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many museums were thinking about digital access, the Short Description Project developed a workflow for creating detailed written descriptions for all individuals encountering art online. This meant sketching out parameters for how long the descriptions could be, what should be included, what language used, what reading level they should be, and what process and training might look like, all from the ground up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lorena Bradford at the National Gallery of Art in 2025<\/p>\n

The Trump administration, however, changed everything. While most accessible program work was and is still intrinsically connected to visitor services and protected by the ADA, \u201cthe strides that I and colleagues from across many, many museums were making related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility were curtailed or stopped,\u201d Bradford said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two years ago, she began undergoing cancer treatment and dropped her hours at the NGA to part-time. She officially left the museum this past July.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But her passion for access never stopped. Now, she works as an audio describer at the Kennedy Center, writes alt text and image descriptions for Scribeley, teaches art history courses at a local community college, and curates all of the content for the LEAD conferences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lorena Bradford at the National Gallery of Art in 2025<\/p>\n

Bradford knows that her educational and career path is unconventional. As more museum education programs come into being, \u201cthere\u2019s not necessarily a place you can go to learn to do cultural accessibility like what we\u2019re doing in museums and theaters,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She looks forward to the day \u2014 which she believes will be sooner rather than later \u2014 when arts accessibility will not only be a distinct, formalized educational path, but there will be ways to accredit people in arts accessibility programming, services, and coordination. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[Art is] a universal language, and everyone should have access to it,” Bradford said. “You don\u2019t have to speak a foreign language to look at a painting made in a different country, or to listen to a piece of music. As a universal language, it should be accessible to the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Feature The first head of Accessible Programs at the National Gallery of Art tells us about her path…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-334587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}