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Media Arts, BFA

Using visual technology, from computer animation to video games, to tell stories.

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Career Opportunities

  • Editorial Photographer
  • Photo Editor
  • Art Director
  • Producer
  • Art Producer
  • Videographer
  • Sound/Audio Designer

Multidisciplinary Skills

  • Camera Operations
  • Set Design
  • Presenting Ideas
  • Teamwork
  • Studio Lighting
  • Audio Recording
  • Time Management

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The Media Arts BFA is an intensive studio program where students can learn about the changing technology landscape while building their skills through theory, experimentation, and critique. Production facilities provide students the opportunity for hands-on learning.

Students can choose one of three concentrations in the Media Arts program: animation, photography, or video arts.

The animation concentration focuses on developing robust, conceptual, narrative, and technical software skills. This rigorous studio program explores the power and potential of effective visual communication through 2D and 3D motion design.

The photography concentration encourages experimental and self-disciplined engagement with photographic processes. Students will learn how materials function, both as physical components of photographic work as well as signifiers of meaning.

Video arts focuses on creative video expression and messaging that weaves together art and design foundations along with video production, cinematic language, and theories of social and cultural change.

Media Arts Learning Outcomes

  1. Demonstrate awareness of the foundation and historical methods of digital media and applying research in portfolio development.
  2. Analyze and critique artistic media effectively through both verbal and written communication, showing the ability to collaborate with peers and related disciplines.
  3. Create a large body of portfolio work representing a wide range of concepts reflecting advanced level of analysis
  4. Evaluate current and future trends in the development digital media by employing skills to disseminate and share information over the medium.
  5. Explain and employ a unique personal style that shows significant contribution in the medium.

Co-Op Opportunities 

  • Boston Public Market
  • The Boston Beer Company
  • TJMaxx and HomeGoods
  • Wayfair

The continuing revolution in digital computing and global communications has produced a rapidly evolving field for artists who create experiences of image and form with computer screens, intelligent devices, and new materials. Artists also invent tools for exploring, creating, and distributing their ideas and works. Media arts practices of animation, game, game art, photography, and video arts are offered with variations more yet to be invented. Courses in imaginative and narrative arts, required for professional work in documentary films, game art and promotion, visualization, motion graphics, interactive art, illustration, and short animated film, are offered. An intensive studio program, the curriculum provides knowledge, experience, and techniques of media arts informed by theory, experimentation, and critique. Extensive digital imaging and interactive media editing and production facilities afford you the opportunity to become highly proficient in the current skills and emerging practices necessary for remarkable work. The media arts are evolving and expanding their reach into culture and society in daily life and global experience. The revolutions in 3-D printing, embedded devices, and robotics are changing the landscape in which the media artist will operate.

This degree is designed to prepare students to meet the challenges of continuous change with adaptive ingenuity. Video arts is a multidisciplinary field focused on creative video expression and messaging that weaves together art and design foundations; art and design history; video production; cinematic language (including documentary, narrative, and experimental strategies); collaborative frameworks; and theories of social and cultural change. The scope of the video arts curriculum is a broader and more diverse tapestry than traditional video art and it reflects the dynamic evolution of video in multiple contexts. The video arts concentration enables students to explore traditional, alternative, and other artistic means of video art production in a variety of creative and technical contexts. The focus on a multiplicity of artistic formats—hence, the choice of the title video arts—underscores our attention to the training of students who are interested in learning how to experiment with new technical, narrative, and aesthetic practices and incorporate these options into the traditional medium of video art.

Concentrations

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