Arts Administration & Policy

Arts Administration & Policy Department: Arts Administration Degree Programs

The Arts Administration and Policy department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is structured around the values of collaboration, creativity, experimentation, inclusion, critical thinking, care, activism, advocacy, and reflection. We believe these values are central to building the future of cultural leadership. 

Building Creative Leadership in Arts Administration

Systems. Cultures. Futures. Strategies.

We embrace the interdisciplinary, experimental core of SAIC through integrated curriculum design; merging theory and practice. We are constantly developing new partnerships and ways of working collaboratively across sectors. We combine inventiveness and aspirational values with solid grounding in practical skills.

SAIC is a natural laboratory located in a thriving, progressive arts community made up of students and faculty from an array of creative practices. It is a place where various currents of artistic, design, cultural production, and scholarly practice meet, intertwine, and recombine. At SAIC, disciplines exceed their own limits. It’s where real-life, emergent environments encourage an ever-evolving, adaptive, shared space of dialogue, problem-solving, world building, and narrative change.

Learn more about our acclaimed Arts Administration degree programs:

• Undergraduate overview
• Master of Arts in Arts Administration and Policy
• Dual Degree: Master of Arts in Arts Administration and Policy & Modern and Contemporary Art History

Preparing for Careers in Arts Administration & Policy 

SAIC’s Arts Administration programs prepare students to reimagine and lead arts and cultural organizations. Students master essential skills while building a critical perspective on the issues of contemporary arts administration and arts management. Working closely with artists and cultural organizations, students promote ethical practice and advocate for the centrality of the arts and culture in everyday life. They develop new approaches to thinking experientially, critically, and politically. Through the Arts Administration and Policy programs, students discover how to be responsive, adaptive, and creative problem-solvers.

Students pursuing Arts Administration degrees come from a variety of professional and academic backgrounds including law; philosophy; political science; education; social services; and more. Alumni from the program have gone on to find careers as art administrators, curators, historians, organizers, museum directors, and more.

Core Commitments

• Thinking and working at the systems and policy level to recognize, acknowledge, and reimagine complex power structures towards the courageous and continuous building of an equitable, inclusive cultural ecosystem
• Working closely, intentionally, empathetically, and intensively with artists, arts & cultural organizations, and beyond
• Actively promoting ethical, environmentally sustainable practice
• Advocating for the centrality of the arts and culture to the wellbeing of individuals and communities in everyday life
• Developing new individual and collaborative approaches to learning
• Thinking experientially, critically, and politically about complex challenges facing the cultural ecosystem
• Building collective intelligence within and across cohorts and alumni
• Elevating creativity in arts administration by leveraging the potential in ambiguity, reframing constraints as opportunity, and refusing scarcity and zero-sum narratives
• Creating a socially just and inclusive impact through work in arts and culture