Rachael Schwabe

Rachael Schwabe is an arts educator living and working in New York City.

After receiving her M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in 2020, Rachael served as a design history instructor for the BGC Lab for Teen Thinkers, the New York School of Interior Design, and The New School.

Her writing explores craft’s affectual impact on process-based art and performance studies, and her research focuses on the work of Janine Antoni, Trisha Brown, and Lenore Tawney. As of 2022 she works at the Museum of Modern Art, where she manages the Museum’s online learning courses.

Rachael Schwabe will be speaking at the Museum Wellness Summit 2026 :

Putting Trauma-Informed Learning into Practice: Workflows and Instructional Design

How do you design an online learning experience that models the care it teaches? In this session, MoMA educators Jackie Armstrong and Rachael Schwabe will take you behind the scenes of Artful Practices for Well-Being, a course that launched on Coursera in 2024, to share how trauma-informed values, contemplative practices, and flexible design enable well-being through art. Grounded in principles of context, connection, and choice, the project evolved through collaboration, reflection, and attention to pacing and capacity. Jackie and Rachael reflect on what supported the team’s well-being as much as the learners’, and offer practical ways museums of any scale can adapt similar values and processes to foster care, inclusivity, and meaningful engagement.