Art School 101
Join us on campus on July 25 to learn how to research undergraduate art programs, prepare your portfolio for admission and merit scholarships, tour our campus and residence halls, and much more.
Take a Campus Tour
Explore our campus by taking a student-led in-person or virtual tour.
Take an Art Class this Summer
Non-credit online and in-person courses for adults start soon! See all courses and register now.
Curious. Bold. Ambitious.
You're ready to take risks and challenge others. You're open to change — and want to change things. This is your playground.
#2 Fine Arts Program
among art and design colleges in the U.S.
U.S. News & World Report
Best Grad Schools
See SAIC Rankings & Accolades
An International Campus
With 80 countries represented among our student body, see why students from around the world come to study art and design at SAIC.
Learn more
160 Years in the Making
SAIC has been at the forefront of art education for more than a century and a half, fostering critical thinking, rigorous investigation, and playful creativity. The School was among the first to embrace self-directed study across disciplines.
This has always been a school that pairs rigor with risk-taking, serious critique with play, and a commitment to individual creative vision with the belief that artists’ and designers’ work can help drive social change. Our alumni lead not just in the fields of art and design, but across a wide range of industries.
The School offers more than 1,000 courses across disciplines, so the academic experience is unique to each of our 3,300+ students. From how artists and designers learn, to our community’s deep involvement with today’s issues, to the fact that we're one of the only museum schools in America—there is no one “something" that makes SAIC stand out.
To visitors, the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the world’s great galleries. To our students, it is an extension of the classroom. Encompassing more than 5,000 years of human expression from cultures around the world, the museum contains more than 300,000 works of art.
Chicago's richness, complexity, and contradictions are the perfect environment for our own diverse community. SAIC alums settle here to make work, open galleries and studios, and power Chicago’s creative industries. The city grounds and inspires the School’s artists and designers. In turn, their impact reverberates throughout Chicago and beyond.
Why SAIC?
Three of our students share what brought them to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tess Shoshana
"The freedom to choose what you learn and how you learn."
Leo Dai
"I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now without Chicago."
Antane Phillips
"The museum, I have now seen it as my second classroom."
Amy Lawson Smeed Will Make You Cry
As head of animation at Walt Disney Animation Studios, alum Amy Lawson Smeed (BFA 1997) is behind the scenes of your favorite movies.
Behind the Scenes
Moana, Frozen, Wreck-it-Ralph, and more: As head of animation at Walt Disney Animation Studios, alum Amy Lawson Smeed (BFA 1997) is behind the scenes of your favorite movies.
Interdisciplinary Study at SAIC
Smeed arrived at SAIC as a painter, but she appreciated that SAIC encouraged interdisciplinary study, so she signed up for graphic design, and then for a course in the relatively new field of computer animation. With her first taste of animation, she was hooked.
Starting at Disney
When she graduated, she was sure that she wanted to be an animator. She got her foot in the door by applying for a job at Disney Animation Studios doing technical work in scene setup for the movie Dinosaur. In her off hours, she used the equipment to build out her own portfolio.
Creative Leadership
As a leader, Smeed makes every effort to protect creativity. Her goal is always to protect an animator’s ownership and risk-taking and not overwrite them with her own taste. This philosophy and care have shaped the animation teams that Smeed leads at Disney and helped to drive her undeniable success.
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