NEW INC, the incubator founded by New York’s New Museum as the first museum-led program of its kind, opened applications this summer for its twelfth annual cohort. The program supports artists, designers, technologists, and creative entrepreneurs working across art and technology, providing workspace, mentorship, and a year-long structured curriculum organized into tracks — a deliberately different model from a typical tech accelerator, aimed at building sustainable creative practices rather than venture-scale companies.
Watch: NEW INC at the New Museum (YouTube)
An institutional home for a field that lacks one
Art-and-technology work falls into an awkward gap: too experimental for most commercial funding, too entrepreneurial for many traditional arts grants, and too interdisciplinary for programs organized around a single medium. NEW INC’s value over eleven years has been holding that gap open — giving practitioners who build interactive installations, creative tools, speculative products, and hybrid practices a peer community, institutional backing, and the time to figure out how the work sustains itself. For the readers of this site’s community beat, it’s one of the most established on-ramps into a professional art-tech practice.
What the program offers and how to apply
Accepted members receive access to shared workspace, a mentorship network drawn from the museum’s and program’s connections, and a curriculum built around tracks that group members by the shape of their practice rather than their discipline. Applications typically ask candidates to articulate the work they’d develop during the year and how the incubator’s resources fit that trajectory. Prospective applicants should review the current cycle’s tracks, deadlines, and fees on the NEW INC site before applying, since the track structure evolves year to year.