Fall 2025 MFA

Apply here by January 8, 2025.

The MFA program at the Department of Fine Arts cultivates an expansive and dynamic approach to teaching artists that prioritizes experimentation, transdisciplinary methodology and heterogenous perspectives. Our MFA program is interdisciplinary, allowing students to develop an individualized course of study supported by sustained collective dialogue and collaborative study. Artists advance their art practice in generative dialogue with a wide range of interlocutors, including a faculty of internationally recognized artists and practitioners, the Sachs Visiting Professor, an established artist offering a non-traditional year-long course based on their own practice and research, committed students, dedicated staff, and a robust group of rotating Visiting Artists and Critics.  

About Weitzman’s MFA Program  
The two-year Master of Fine Arts program at University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is focused on the professional development of studio artists. The MFA program facilitates in-depth engagement with the skills and technologies of art-making as well as with the intellectual and theoretical discourse necessary for an artist to situate themselves and their work in a set of intersecting histories and fields of practice. At the center of the program’s curriculum is studio production supported by a constellation of individual and group studio critiques led by the faculty and an acclaimed group of rotating visitors: senior critics, visiting artists, curators and writers. Students choose from a vigorous set of departmental courses in a range of media from video, photography, sculpture, painting and drawing to performance, animation and biological design.   

The department encourages cross-departmental and cross-school study and research. Housed within the Weitzman School of Design, the program offers artists ready opportunities for creative dialogue with practitioners in the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation. We offer dual-degrees and certificate programs for those who want to pursue formal cross-department study. Additionally, there are leading scholars and researchers across the university and MFA students are encouraged and supported to take course work in departments such as Creative Writing, English, Anthropology, Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Biology and more.  

Vital to our program are our collaborations with the leading art institutions on campus, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Arthur Ross Gallery. The department partners with the ICA to host a yearly Visiting Artist series, through which we bring prominent artists and creative thinkers to campus to lecture and do studio visits with artists in the MFA program.   

This year we are thrilled to welcome our newest faculty member, Ani Liu, who joins us as the Carrafiell Assistant Professor in Fine Arts. Liu is a dynamic artist and designer whose research-based practice situates itself between art, science, and technology. Drawing from a transdisciplinary field, Liu is well positioned to play a pivotal role in informing how we teach students based on pedagogic, social, and technological change. Liu joins an outstanding group of MFA faculty that includes David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, Michelle Lopez, Ken Lum, Joshua Mosley and Jackie Tileston. Our Sachs Visiting Professors have included Paul Pfeiffer, Every Ocean Hughes, Ernesto Pujol, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Ralph Lemon, Josiah McElheny and Wael Shawky.  

The Department of Fine Arts is shaped by the artists who come to study and work with us. We look forward to meeting you and to learning about your work and the desires you have for your art practice.   

You may view student work in our virtual gallery here, and check out our events & lecture series here. Email us at mfa [​at​] upenn.edu.