Graduate Art MFA program

The Graduate Art Department at ArtCenter College of Design is pleased to invite prospective students to apply to our MFA program for the fall academic year of 2023. The program is open to all candidates working in any medium in the broad field of contemporary art.

About our program:
Grad Art is an interdisciplinary MFA program that encourages divergent ideas and methods. With a core faculty of ten internationally recognized artists and writers, numerous adjunct and guest faculty and a total of 35 students, we have one of the lowest faculty-to-student ratios among comparable programs worldwide. The result is an intense work environment where concentrated artmaking is assured and accompanied by concentrated, careful attention both within and beyond the disciplines practiced by our Core Faculty: film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance and philosophy.

Fundamental to our two-year program are one-on-one studio visits with faculty and rigorous critical, academic, and practical coursework. We extend our reach internationally, inviting artists and writers, famous and infamous, as well as historians and philosophers for weekly lecture-seminars. Coming from and going to Europe respectively, our artist-in-residence partnership and student exchange link us with programs in Paris, Berlin and Cologne.

Los Angeles is one of the world’s great art capitals and ArtCenter College of Design, of which we are a part, is a cutting-edge design school with all the state-of-the-art imaging and making technology one would expect. On site, we provide students with individual studios, several gallery spaces, and dedicated print, computing and moving image production labs. We make our public gallery spaces and project rooms available to all candidates, from the first term through the fifth, when every graduating student mounts a final solo show.

We currently offer a full scholarship to one incoming student every other year and, thanks to the success of our recent benefit sale of works donated by faculty and alumni, Artists for Art Center, we are creating an endowment with the aim of making that an annual occurrence by 2024. This year, the Grad Art department also awarded a half-tuition scholarship for students from under-represented communities and a merit-based half-tuition scholarship for second year students, a practice we aim to continue into the future. In 2021, approximately 56 percent of ArtCenter students received institutional scholarship and 72 percent of ArtCenter students received Financial Aid.

Core faculty: Stan Douglas (Chair), Kelly Akashi, Lita Albuquerque, Ei Arakawa, Gabrielle Jennings, Shahryar Nashat, Laura Owens, Patti Podesta, Jason E. Smith, and Diana Thater.

Application deadline: Sunday, January 15, 2023, 11:59pm PST. After the deadline has passed, applications will continue to be accepted until the program fill to capacity. For more information on how to apply to our MFA Graduate Art program, please visit our website.

Prospective applicants are welcome to tour the Graduate Art Department by appointment with Program Manager Gal Amiram.  To schedule a tour, please email: gradart [​at​] artcenter.edu.