About

The Stanford Medicine Art and Anatomy Summer Program is a one- or two-week in-person immersion at Stanford's School of Medicine exploring the intersection of visual art and human anatomy. Students engage with a speaker series featuring anatomists, physicians, and artists whose work bridges medicine and visual storytelling, followed by a week of intensive drawing mentorship culminating in a resolved final illustration. The two-week format includes both the lecture series and the studio component; the one-week format centers on studio work alone.

The program explicitly welcomes students from both scientific and artistic backgrounds and requires no prior experience in either drawing or anatomy. Admission details are not published, and based on the program structure and open eligibility language, it does not appear to be meaningfully selective. The final project is presented to a panel of artists, museum curators, and physicians — a capstone format that distinguishes the program from purely instructional enrichment experiences and gives students a professional audience for their work.

The program sits within Stanford's Medicine and the Muse initiative, which develops medical humanities curricula for undergraduate, graduate, and medical students at Stanford. High school participants are engaging with the same conceptual territory — and in some cases the same instructor — as students enrolled in Stanford's degree programs. For students drawn to medicine, visual art, or the emerging field of medical illustration and visual communication in healthcare, the Art and Anatomy program offers a substantive and unusually specific introduction unavailable at most peer institutions.