MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice

The Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program (EASP) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, welcomes applications now for admission in the fall of 2025.

We look forward to inviting our fifth cohort of students to join us next year as we continue to build the EASP learning and research community. The linked urgencies of systemic social inequality and climate crises drive our research, our curriculum, our pedagogy, and our vision for this program, which aims to engage students in creating positive change through creative practice.

This two-year residential program seeks prospective applicants to develop their artwork in relation to social and environmental justice questions, contexts, and communities. Headed by internationally recognized artists and affiliate faculty from across campus, the program integrates the resources of a renowned public research university with the Art Department’s mission of educating and training students in cross-disciplinary, multimedia art practices.

Curriculum
The EASP program offers core courses in practice-based research, theoretical, methodological, and historical foundations of the field, and arts pedagogies. Students gain practical experience through direct engagement with places and communities and hone their critical analysis skills while developing their creative directions through their thesis projects. Group critique and production courses, faculty advising and mentorship, and electives drawn from the university at large support thesis projects.

Faculty
The EASP faculty engage a range of interdisciplinary topics in our research, from racial justice and food security to land use and environmental activism to public policy, science, technology, education, social movements, labor struggles, ecosexuality, and global migration. As leading practitioners in our fields, we present and distribute work through a wide range of venues and invent new forms and systems for public engagement.

Funding
Recognizing that funding can be an obstacle to graduate education, the University of California, Santa Cruz, guarantees teaching assistantships that provide tuition remission and a stipend for the six consecutive quarters of the program. The training and experience gained from teaching assistantships is an integral part of the EASP education.

We invite adventurous students to learn and grow with us as we build this program, in which socio-bio-diversity is acknowledged, respected, and celebrated, and through which we cultivate our abilities to respond as artists to urgent contemporary issues as we insist on the thriving (not just surviving) of all life on earth.

Virtual information sessions:
Saturday,  November 2, 2024. 12–2pm PST 
Tuesday,  December 3, 2024. 12–2pm PST 

RSVP here to attend one or more info sessions with the Graduate Director. The EASP MFA application deadline is January 30 at 11:59pm PST.

For more information contact: artmfa [​at​] ucsc.edu.