The Division of Media Arts + Practice within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California offers a rigorous and creative environment for scholarly innovation as students explore the intersections of cinema, design, emerging media and critical thinking while defining new forms of cinematic experience, research and scholarship for the 21st century. Core to the program is its transdisciplinary ethos, its dynamic curriculum and its commitment to the union of critical thinking and making. The BA in Media Arts + Practice is an interdisciplinary storytelling program combining the study of contemporary digital media with hands-on production and research. Students create experiences across diverse platforms: still images, text, audio, video, interactivity, web-based interfaces, social media, mobile environments and physical computing. They also study the history and theory of media forms while exploring emerging genres such as virtual reality, stereoscopy, transmedia storytelling and interactive performance. In the PhD program, students design their own curricula, drawing on expertise within the School’s research labs and across the USC campus. The areas of research investigated by PhD students include: interactive architecture; media activism; empathy, affect and emerging technologies; world building; tangible interfaces; alternative game design; digital historiography; expanded and spatialized cinema; pervasive/locative media; and immersive journalism.