MA Curatorial Practice

The master of arts degree in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City trains curators in an immersive two-year program with an intense focus on teaching every aspect of curatorial work, so that our graduates enter the professional field with practical knowledge of how to do the work, as well as base it in theory and history. 

This hands-on training is joined with international fieldwork and internships with leading curators in major institutions throughout the world. The students have opportunities to produce exhibitions and other projects throughout New York and beyond. Our graduates go on to curatorial jobs at a global range of museums and institutions in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, often with the curators who have mentored them.

Our state-of-the-art space in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood is close by hundreds of galleries and museums, and our students have further internships at institutions ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the New Museum to such leading smaller venues as Art in General, the Kitchen, the Drawing Center, and e-flux, among many others.

Our faculty and faculty at large include major curators, institution leaders, critics, and theorists, both New York-based and international, including Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy, Clémentine Deliss, Thierry de Duve, Emmanuel Iduma, Chrissie Iles, Tim Griffin, Hou Hanru, Maria Lind, Steven Henry Madoff, Chus Martinez, Laurel Ptak, Sara Reisman, Charles Renfro, David A. Ross, Roddy Schrock, Terry Smith, Lumi Tan, Mick Wilson, and Brian Kuan Wood.

Our Curatorial Roundtable brings 60 curators from around the world for individual sessions with our students—sessions that have turned into internships and project work. These meetings offer our students an extraordinary range of approaches to curating, anecdotal histories, ways of solving problems, and the opportunity to build a network of professional connections that would be impossible to create otherwise in so short a period of time.

Along with the Roundtable, the courses we offer cover practical training in curating exhibitions, programming for institutions, considerations of different kinds of institutions and curatorial formats, non-exhibitionary curatorial projects, along with everything from lighting and exhibition design to grant writing, conservation, presentation-making, and several workshops in writing. All are taught by working curators and professionals teaching what they do. Courses in exhibition history, art history, and theory add depth and breadth to the practical training in the program. Fieldwork with the program includes a subsidized trip to a major international biennial—this year, for example, to the Berlin Biennale.

Our students make several exhibitions and projects both in our own space and in other New York venues, all of them subsidized by the program. And of course, as our program is part of one of the largest art schools in the US, our students can take advantage of the remarkable facilities of SVA and the range of students to work with across more than 30 programs and disciplines, undergraduate and graduate. Not only do our students make numerous projects in the program, they typically take on work within the New York art world and its unparalleled density of artists, galleries, and institutions all within close proximity of our program space.

All of these experiences in the two years of the degree and the hands-on training we provide truly prepare graduates to enter the professional world. We’re proud to say that this continues to lead to jobs for our graduates in both small and large institutions nationally and internationally.

We offer the place and time to expand your thinking and skills as a curator, with an extraordinary international faculty in one of the great centers of art in the world. We are now accepting applications for fulltime and part-time students. We offer competitive merit-based supporting fellowships and our tuition is competitive with other curatorial master’s programs in the US. For information and to apply, click here.