Each mentoring session accommodates 100 participants on a first-come, first-served basis. Attendees will be divided into four groups of 25 per mentor. Please arrive early to secure a seat with your preferred mentor.

ANA MARIA THERESA P. LABRADOR
Harnessing the New Museum Definition and Creating Possibilities for Visitor-Led
Programmes: Case studies for Needs Assessment, Dialogue, and Co-curation

Museums have increasingly recognized their role as active agents in community life. The new
museum definition by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) reinforces this shift by
emphasizing access, inclusion, and community engagement, concepts long practiced by
museum professionals but now institutionally acknowledged as central to museum purpose.
This mentoring session examines how museums can deepen their social impact by designing
programmes that are accessible, visitor-led, and community-oriented. Through case studies and
collective discussion, participants will explore how museums can become spaces of creativity
and belonging. The session will conclude by inviting participants to reflect on their own
institutions, sharing approaches and challenges in making them universally accessible,
inclusive, and responsive to the communities they serve.

MANAL ATAYA
Opening the Doors Wider: Reducing Barriers and Expanding Access in Museum Spaces

Museums are evolving from spaces of presentation to spaces of participation. In this context,
enriching audience engagement requires dialogue, reflection, and a commitment to inclusion
and accessibility across museum practice.
This mentoring session explores strategies for enriching audience engagement in museum
spaces through dialogue, reflection, and practical examples. Participants will examine key
elements including inclusion, accessibility, audience demographics, technology integration, and
culturally responsive practice. Through collaborative discussion, we will consider how museums
can foster meaningful experiences for diverse communities by reducing barriers to participation
and creating opportunities for shared learning.
The session will highlight approaches for welcoming varied groups, enhancing social
integration, and deepening visitor connection to collections, narratives, and public programs. By
the end, participants will have tools to reimagine engagement as an active, inclusive, and
community-centered practice.

LUCIANA MENEZES DE CARVALHO
Understanding, Sharing, Integrating: Methodological Experiences for a Collective
Museum Practice

This presentation reflects on methodological experiences developed through a professional and
academic trajectory guided by three interrelated movements: to understand, to share, and to
integrate. These verbs synthesise an approach to museology that is not limited to institutions or
collections, but is understood as a living and relational practice.
The first movement, Understanding, explores the theoretical and epistemological foundations of
museology from a perspective rooted in the Global South. It stresses the importance of
Museology, highlighting the transformative potential of museums as spaces of encounter and
recognition.
The second movement, Sharing, presents, as a consequence of the first movement, a long-term
heritage education project developed in Southern Minas Gerais, Brazil. Through participatory
and playful methodologies, the project invited children and young people to rethink what
museums and heritage could be, based on their own experiences, memories, and affective
connections.
Finally, Integrating focuses on the creation of the UNIRIO Territorial Museum, a university-
based initiative that seeks to reimagine the campus as a distributed and participatory territory
museum. This project aims to integrate teaching, research, and community engagement,
fostering new relationships between the university and the city.
Together, these experiences propose a museology grounded in life, diversity, and collective
creation—one that celebrates difference and imagines new possibilities for museums to exist in
and with the world.

MARIA CRISTINA VANNINI
Title: Visitor Experience: A Continuous Journey

As marketing science suggests, the visitor experience is a journey that doesn’t start at the
museum’s door. Visitors need to be informed, intrigued, and engaged long before they decide to
invest their time and resources in the experience of entering a museum — and to truly enjoy it.
In many cases, museum audiences need to be encouraged to come back.
How can this be achieved? By carefully studying the context, the population, and the
communities the museum aims to reach. Museums must learn to use all available touchpoints
— whether multimedia, digital, or analogue — to build a rich and engaging visitor experience
that begins well beyond the museum’s immediate surroundings. Neuromarketing can help
assess the outcomes and plan the visitor journey more effectively.