Start your UW experience inside the studios and woodshop of the UW School of Art, Art History, and Design.

Your Stories, Your Museum is an immersive, hands-on course designed exclusively for incoming transfer students. This seminar recognizes that transfer students arrive at UW with rich academic, creative, and life experiences, and it places those perspectives at the center of the learning experience from day one.

In this course, you’ll work across the Burke Museum and the studios and woodshop of the UW School of Art, Art History, and Design to explore how personal experience, culture, and storytelling shape the way knowledge is created and shared. Using the Burke’s cultural collections from Oceania and Asia, you’ll conduct individual and group research that examines how museums represent communities, and how your own voice can challenge, expand, or reshape those narratives.

Class meetings take place inside museum spaces, art studios, and the woodshop, giving you hands-on access to tools, collections, and creative environments that most students do not encounter until much later in their UW careers. You’ll collaborate closely with classmates and a community artist on two creative projects that blend research, storytelling, and making.

The course culminates in creating a pop-up exhibit in the Burke’s first-floor workroom, where you’ll transform your research and ideas into a tangible public-facing project. Along the way, you’ll build skills in collaboration, research, creative thinking, and communicating ideas—skills that transfer across majors and career paths.

No prior museum or art experience is required. This course is open only to transfer students and is designed to help you begin your UW journey feeling confident, connected, and creatively engaged.

Learn more about the instructor of this course:

Teaching Professor Dominic Muren, Design, UW School of Art + Art History + Design