What Happens When Museums Turn Mindfulness Inward

The Getty has spent years helping visitors slow down and connect with art. Now it is applying those same practices to the people who work there — with results that reach from daily stress management to the science of conservation itself.

There is a particular irony in the museum sector’s relationship with mindfulness. Institutions have invested significantly in helping visitors arrive more fully — to breathe, to look slowly, to be present with a work of art. And yet the professionals who make those experiences possible are often racing between meetings, managing complex logistics, and carrying the weight of a demanding working environment. The Getty has started doing something about that.

Turning the Practice Inward

Since 2015, Getty Museum educator Lilit Sadoyan has been at the forefront of integrating mindfulness into encounters with art for public audiences. Over the years, she has worked with underserved youth, medical students, and undergraduate interns — developing programmes that use the museum as a space for contemplative practice. But a few years ago, she noticed a gap.

“There was one important audience area that I had not yet served: museum professionals.”

The result was Mindful Moment for Staff: a programme inviting colleagues from across the Getty Trust to begin their working day with a paired mindfulness meditation and mindful looking session. Sessions were held on weekday mornings at 9:30am — thirty minutes before the museum opened to the public, in the relative quiet of an early gallery — and were designed to be brief, accessible, and repeatable. No prior meditation experience was required. Participants came from conservation, operations, education, and beyond.

The premise was straightforward. A large body of research supports the benefits of mindfulness for stress reduction, focus, and mental wellbeing. But Sadoyan was also interested in something more specific to the professional context: the way presence, attention, and relationship-building are not peripheral to museum work but absolutely central to it. Mindfulness, in this framing, is not a wellness add-on. It is a form of professional development.

Art as the Anchor

What distinguishes these sessions from generic workplace wellbeing programmes is the role of the artwork itself. Every activity, every breathing exercise, every reflection grows directly out of the object being encountered. The art is not a backdrop. It is the method.

Working with Helen Pashgian’s light installation, Sadoyan led participants through a breathing exercise synchronised with the work — inhaling to draw the piece in, exhaling to move deeper into its centre. With sustained attention fixed on the core, a perceptual after-image emerged: an aqua halo appearing at the periphery of vision, a physiological communion between viewer and object. Participants reflected on ephemerality, impermanence, and change in their own lives.

With Toba Khedoori’s large-scale drawing of tangled vines, the sessions explored cycles of reaching and rooting — breath expanding outward, then settling back into the body. Participants followed single vines through the complex composition, noticing points of connection and interdependence. Conversations moved naturally toward the entanglement of professional and personal life, the tension between competition and mutual support, and memories of times when relying on others had enabled growth.

These are not superficial comparisons. The objects are chosen and facilitated in ways that create genuine resonance — between looking and feeling, between art and life.

Making Space After Crisis

One of the more revealing aspects of the programme was how it adapted in response to real circumstances. When the devastating Los Angeles fires of early 2025 disrupted normal operations, the exhibition that had anchored the programme was extended, and so too were the sessions. Colleagues from the Getty Villa, temporarily relocated to the Getty Centre, began attending. For many staff, the morning sessions became a space to gather, to connect, and — carefully, without forcing it — to process collective trauma.

Even the unexpected contributed. During one session, a scissor lift outside the gallery produced persistent noise and the sustained beeping of a safety alarm throughout the meditation. Rather than treating it as an interruption, Sadoyan reframed it in real time. “How perfect,” she told participants — and meant it. By the end of the session, some had found the beeping reminiscent of a heartbeat, a reminder of their own aliveness. Others recognised in the noise the constant interference of their own thoughts, and noticed the shift as they moved from resistance to acceptance.

That moment of improvised teaching captures something important about the programme’s underlying philosophy. Mindfulness is not about creating perfect conditions. It is about meeting conditions as they are.

A Pilot in Conservation

Alongside the staff programme, Sadoyan was developing a second question: could mindfulness translate into the highly specialised context of art conservation?

The question came partly from Rachel Rivenc, Head of Conservation and Preservation at the Getty Research Institute, who had developed her own modest meditation practice and begun to see potential crossovers with her professional work. Conservators, she observed, face a distinctive combination of challenges: tasks that are physically demanding and intensely repetitive, yet simultaneously high-risk and requiring extreme vigilance. The kind of grounded, non-judgmental attention that mindfulness cultivates seemed directly relevant.

There was also a subtler issue. Conservators must look deeply at objects — assessing their materiality, history, condition, and treatment needs — and in doing so, they may make a cascade of rapid judgments without being fully conscious of them. Cultural bias, over-reliance on expertise, and the habits of experience can all shape what a conservator sees, and how. Could mindfulness help bring those assumptions to the surface? Could it sustain the kind of openness that allows an object to genuinely teach you something?

Working with Rivenc and neuroscientist Tedi Asher of the Peabody Essex Museum, Sadoyan developed a pilot workshop held in December 2024 at the Getty Centre, in collaboration with the Conservation Association of Los Angeles and UCLA Mindful. Participants — selected for both their interest and their willingness to serve as co-experimenters — wore biofeedback monitors throughout the day and completed mindfulness state surveys before and after each exercise. The day included a cold object examination conducted without any prior mindfulness activity, a second examination following a guided meditation, and a third guided in real time by Sadoyan’s specially developed mindful looking prompts.

Those prompts introduced something new: the sense of touch. Conservators were invited to bring attention to the body as a field of perception, to engage with materials, textures, and temperatures before gradually attending to shapes, forms, contextual influences, and finally to the emotions and thoughts that arose as they worked — held lightly, without attachment.

What the Data — and the Participants — Suggested

The scientific analysis of the biofeedback data is ongoing, but early findings are encouraging. Both the survey data and participant feedback pointed toward meditation practices supporting a heightened mindfulness state and a richer experience of object examination. Several participants reported experiencing joy during the sessions — a response that struck the facilitators as both meaningful and underreported in discussions of conservation practice.

For Rivenc, that last point matters beyond its immediate warmth. “It is easy to get so wrapped up in the stress and routine of our professional practice that we forget the initial curiosity and joy that brought us to this field in the first place.” The ambition of this work is not simply to reduce strain. It is to restore something.

The programme is already moving forward. A second pilot workshop is being organised in conjunction with the American Institute for Conservation’s annual conference in May 2026, with the aim of gathering further scientific data and continuing the design of mindfulness activities specifically shaped for the conservation field.

A Model Worth Considering

Taken together, these two initiatives suggest something more than a pair of successful programmes. They offer a model — practical, replicable, and grounded in genuine institutional care — for how museums might rethink their relationship with the people who work within them.

The logistical considerations Sadoyan shares are modest in scale: thoughtful scheduling, coordination with security, short sessions offered across different weekdays, announcements through internal channels, a bookended structure that creates trust. None of this requires significant resource. What it requires is the decision to treat staff wellbeing as a genuine institutional priority, rather than a benefit to mention in the staff handbook.

“Such programmes helped staff reconnect with the museum as a space of renewal,” Sadoyan reflects. In a sector that has done so much to offer that renewal to others, it is a reminder worth sitting with.

Lilit Sadoyan is a Museum Educator at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Dr. Rachel Rivenc is Head of Conservation and Preservation at the Getty Research Institute. They presented this work together at the Museums & Wellbeing Summit 2026.