Art Internships for High School Students: Where the Paid Programs Live

Most paid art internships for high school students live in five US cities. If you grew up in New York, you have five real options to apply for.

If you live in Tucson, your strongest move is different, and we will get there. Geography matters here more than in any other internship category.

This guide separates programs honestly. Real paid internships, with stipends or hourly wages. Selective summer programs that run free. Teen councils, which are ambassador roles and not internships. And the path to ask about if your city has none of these.

Most application windows for the next summer cycle open between October and February. Whitney Youth Insights Leaders on January 16, Museum of Jewish Heritage on February 13, the Met on March 13. Each program below names eligibility, pay, and what the work involves.

How HS Art Internships Work in Practice

Three different things show up under the "art internship" label online, and they are not the same. Knowing which is which saves you a lot of wasted application time.

Paid internships. Museums and design studios paying stipends or hourly wages. The Met pays $1,100 for the summer cycle. Brooklyn Museum pays $16.50 an hour for first-year apprentices. These are real jobs, with onboarding and supervisors, just compressed into a school-friendly schedule.

Funded summer programs. Free to attend, often selective, focused on art-making and museum exposure rather than work output. You learn, you make, you do not get paid because you are not delivering work the museum sells or exhibits.

Teen councils. Advisory groups of 10 to 20 teens who help shape programming for younger visitors. Most major museums have one. The work is real but light (three to five meetings a semester) and the stipend is usually small or none.

The fourth thing that shows up online, the $5,000 "design portfolio summer immersion" packages, are courses with portfolio output. Skip these unless you have already exhausted the free options. You can build the same portfolio at home for the price of materials and online critiques.

New York City Programs

Five real paid internships live within Manhattan and Brooklyn subway distance. If you live in any of the five boroughs and you are serious about working at a museum, this is your list.

Met HS Summer Internships. The Met runs three internship cycles a year. Summer is competitive, but there is also a spring semester program that accepts applications and runs across the school year.

Interns work in education, communications, or behind-the-scenes departments, not directly in galleries. The application asks for a teacher recommendation, a short essay, and a portfolio if you are applying to art-making roles.

Whitney Youth Insights Leaders. This one is not a one-summer placement. Youth Insights Leaders is the senior tier of a multi-year pipeline.

You start with YI Artists or YI Arts Careers in your sophomore or junior year, complete a semester of programming, then apply to be a paid Leader. The January 16 deadline is your most urgent if you are reading this in December.

Brooklyn Museum Museum Apprentice Program. Different vibe from the Met. Apprentices clock in, get a paycheck, and do real curatorial-adjacent work over a year. The hourly rate is genuinely competitive for first jobs in the city. Applications reopen in July, so if you missed this cycle, calendar it for next.

Museum of Jewish Heritage HS Apprenticeship. Specific to Jewish history and Holocaust education programming. Even if you are not Jewish, the program welcomes applicants who can engage seriously with the subject matter. Paid, and the February 13 window is tight but still open.

Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The most design-forward of the NYC list. $2,000 stipend, summer-based. Application closes in late September for the following summer, so if you are reading this in December, you missed the most recent cycle but can plan ahead for next year.

Los Angeles Programs

Two real paid options in LA. The list is shorter than NYC, but the Getty alone is worth applying to twice if you missed it the first time.

Getty High School Internship. Stipend on completion plus paid transportation to and from the Getty Center. Open to LA County HS juniors and seniors, with a focus on outreach and education.

This is the HS-specific Getty program; do not confuse it with Getty Marrow, which is undergrad-only and shows up wrongly on a lot of HS lists.

Inner-City Arts. Located in downtown LA, this is more of a free arts learning program than a traditional internship, but it counts as serious creative time and the staff write recommendation letters that LA-area BFA programs respect.

The LA Conservancy Getty Marrow internship and Academy Museum Getty Marrow programs you might see online are college-level only. Skip those for now and apply when you are in undergrad.

Chicago Programs

Two strong programs, both year-round and paid. Chicago is honestly underrated for HS art if you live there.

Art Institute of Chicago. The teen internship runs in seasonal cohorts and pays Chicagoland teens for content work, gallery support, and education programming. The application is rolling, but cohorts fill by mid-summer for fall starts.

MCA Chicago. The yearlong cultural leadership program for teens 14 to 19 sits closer to cultural studies than internship, but participation is paid and the staff write thoughtful letters. Application opens late spring for the next school year.

DC, San Francisco, and Smaller Markets

DC has the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian system, both of which run unpaid teen learning programs that look like internships on paper. They are real exposure but not paid placements; if you are weighing time, factor that in honestly.

San Francisco has SFMOMA, which runs a teen learning program with art-making and museum tours. Selective, free, not paid. Worth doing if you live in the Bay and you missed bigger application windows.

Other metros with one strong program each:

• Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council, Minneapolis (advisory plus creative; small stipend)

• Denver Art Museum summer teen program (unpaid; gallery + workshops)

• High Museum Atlanta Teen Team (unpaid; community + art-making)

• Philadelphia Museum of Art youth programs (internships + workshops, mostly unpaid)

These count if you live within driving distance, but the scale is smaller and most are unpaid. Do not skip them just because they are local. A semester at your local museum is real exposure, even if a stipend is missing.

Museum Teen Councils Are Not Internships

A common mistake on lists like this one (including older articles you might have read on this site) is treating teen councils as paid internships. They are not the same thing.

A teen council is an advisory group: 10 to 20 teens who meet a few times a semester to help the museum's education department design programming for younger visitors. The work is real and the experience is genuine. But the time commitment is light, and the pay is usually a small stipend or none.

A paid internship is a job. You clock in, you have a supervisor, you produce something the museum uses. Six to twenty hours a week, hourly or per-project pay.

Both look great on an application. They signal different things. A council membership shows you can lead and represent. An internship shows you can ship work. Apply to both if you can. Just know which is which when you describe the role in your essay.

What Lists Get Wrong

A few errors keep showing up across HS art internship lists, worth clearing up:

• Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship is for undergraduates. The eligibility page is explicit: you must have completed at least one semester of college and reside permanently in or attend college in LA County. High schoolers cannot apply, despite what you might read elsewhere.

• MoMA does not run a HS internship program. Their internship eligibility starts at rising junior status (two completed years of college). Lists that include MoMA in HS roundups are wrong.

• Most "museum teen programs" listed as internships are councils or learning programs. The labels matter when admissions officers read your application. Be honest in your description of the role.

• Pay-to-play "design immersion" packages charging $4,000 to $7,000 are courses with portfolio output. You can build the same portfolio at home for the price of materials and supervised online critiques.

If a program does not name a stipend or hourly wage and does not require a job-style application (resume, supervisor reference, work output), it is probably a council or a course, not an internship.

If Your City Has None of These

If you live outside the top metros, your two strongest moves are not on any list. They are cold-email moves.

Cold-email a local museum's education department. Your nearest art museum almost certainly has an education or community programs team.

Email the team coordinator or the lead educator. Tell them you are a HS student interested in a specific exhibition or topic of theirs (name it), and ask if they have summer volunteer opportunities.

Be specific about the exhibition. Ask about volunteer hours, not necessarily a paid role. Many smaller museums create informal placements for serious teens.

Cold-email a local design studio. Look up two or three design studios in your city. Open their about page. Find the founder or design lead's email (usually [email protected]).

Email a one-paragraph note: who you are, what you have made (link to a Behance or simple portfolio site), and that you would help on small projects (5 to 10 hours per week) for portfolio work.

Most studios do not have intern slots posted because they are too small to formalize. They will sometimes say yes when asked.

Both moves take ten emails to land one yes. Worth a weekend. The psychology internships guide has a working template you can adapt for either move.

Application Calendar From December Forward

If you are reading this in December, here is what is still in front of you for the upcoming summer.

If you missed December, you missed Cooper Hewitt for next year (late September deadline). The good news: Brooklyn Museum reopens in July and you can plan a stronger application with the extra months.

Final Word

Art internships reward students who treat the application like a creative project. A two-page essay full of "I love art" is forgettable.

A two-page essay built around one specific story (the time you spent two hours studying one Vermeer; the night you copied a Monet badly and figured out why his light is hard) lands.

Show your work. Send a portfolio link even when it is not required. Pick three pieces, not fifteen. The fewer pieces the better, if you can defend each one out loud.

For paid programs in adjacent fields, our tech internships guide covers research-track options at MIT, Stanford, and NASA. If you are weighing creative versus career-track choices, our business internships guide lays out a four-filter framework that works for any field, art included.

And if you are early in the application process (resume, recommendations, follow-up notes), the dream internship guide walks through the steps from cold-email to thank-you note.

For fashion-design specifically, our fashion internships guide covers Parsons, Pratt, RISD, and other school-based pre-college tracks alongside paid corporate fashion programs.

For students whose creative work leans toward writing, reporting, and editorial rather than visual art, our journalism internships guide covers free residential journalism programs and the build-your-own-byline path.

The best art internships for high school students are the ones close enough that you can show up consistently, paid enough that you take them seriously, and selective enough that you remember earning them. Everything else is supporting evidence.