A Catalyst for Team Building
Corinne Zimmermann ‘78 is a leader in museum-based education for healthcare professionals
BY KATE DUNLOP
Picture this: In a Boston-area teaching hospital, a medical team on clinical rounds rotates into a patient’s room. An intern hears the attending doctor say something that doesn’t match what he’s observed. Should he say something? There’s no invitation to ask questions; the doctor’s pace and authority deter the intern, and he stays silent. Later, he learns speaking up could have had a meaningful impact on the patient’s care plan.
Now picture that same team, which includes medical school students, nurses, interns, attendings and residents, gathered at the Museum of Fine Arts for a team building workshop. The hierarchy of the hospital lingers. It’s up to healthcare consultant Corinne Zimmermann ’78 to create an environment where the team members can feel free to share stories, ask questions and learn from one other.
To start, she leads the group through playful warmups that get them talking and moving before transitioning into an interpretive conversation, during which her goal is for them to slow down and really see a work of art. She might use “Watson and the Shark,” a piece that portrays a life-or-death crisis, and ask them to share what they think is going on, what grounds their ideas in the evidence of the picture, who in the picture they identify with and why — and how their patterns of observation, listening and communication are relevant to their work.
“By then, they’re open and share personal and clinical stories in a way that allows them to reflect on their shared profession,” Zimmermann says. “It’s beautiful when they talk about their joys, because it’s a choice to lean into a joy, but they also talk in very vulnerable ways about their struggles, and that creates real connection which can help bond a team and mediate burnout.”
The workshop experience also shifts how providers see their teammates and to recognize their own blind spots. As one physician participant put it, “I used to only listen to people I thought were important. I’ve realized everybody has something important to say.” That sort of revelation carries over to the clinical setting, where the team works together with new awareness and respect.
To make such an impact, Zimmermann draws on the influence of her family, her love for art history and her decades as a museum educator.
The daughter of a diplomat, Zimmermann lived in Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Moscow and Paris before coming to St. Paul’s School. Each new location offered a museum that Zimmermann’s mother turned into an adventure of discovery — from a young age, she says, museums have felt like home.
“I love museums. When I walk into one, there’s always this sense of an exhale,” she says. “I enter with a sense of curiosity and the anticipation of seeing new things, or sometimes even of visiting old friends.”
At St. Paul’s, Zimmermann took an art history course and fell in love with the subject because it was about the world — about people and ideas. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history and followed a calling to make museums more accessible to a broader public. Years as an educator at the Harvard Art Museums, Peabody Essex Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum honed her mission. In 2010, she started to balance that work with healthcare consulting; in 2019, soon after her mother died, she decided to consult full time and co-founded the Harvard Macy Fellowship in Art Museum-based Education for Healthcare Professionals. In 2023, she co-authored “Activating the Art Museum: Designing Experiences for the Health Professions.”
“A lot of the work I’ve done is about bringing a sense of play and creating pathways for connection as a means to build team skills and self-awareness,” she says. “Healthcare can be rewarding, but it’s hard and exhausting, and there is rarely space in the hospital for providers to breathe, process or reflect. There is that space in a museum, and it’s an incredible honor to do this work. I’m always learning, and it allows me to be creative, connect with people and make a difference.”