About Media Study's MFA Program
The Department of Media Study's MFA in Media Arts is one of the country's leading programs in experimental and independent media. As a department and as a community we are committed to producing work which challenges and extends conventional forms and representations.
Currently, the department has research groups working in Independent Film and Video (including Documentary) , Robotics, Digital Art (including Net-based Art and Digital Poetics) , Virtual Reality/Interactive Fiction. In addition, we have close relationships with graduate programs in Visual Studies (a joint concentration exploring the interdisciplinary space between emerging technologies and the arts called Emerging Practices), Architecture (a joint M.Arch/MFA), American Studies/The Center for the Americas (where several of our students have earned joint MFA/PhD degrees), Music, and Comparative Literature among others. We encourage students to pursue their interests across media forms and disciplinary boundaries and to approach the department as a laboratory in which critical approaches and media can interact in previously unforseen ways.
In keeping with this commitment, our MFA is a flexible program which enables students to work in or across media technologies and academic disciplines. Of the 60 credit hours required for the degree, 24 are in media production, 12 are in areas of media theory (history and interpretation), 13 are in directed electives (courses related to the thesis). With one exception – a two semester critique course – there are no required courses and students are free to organize their course of study around their own interests and projects. As this distribution of courses indicates, Media Study is a department which believes strongly in the relationship between critical theory and critical practice. For this reason, the thesis has both a media production component (an exhibit or final project) and a discursive component (a final written 30-50 page thesis).