About the Graduate Program

An Education for Thinkers
 

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An image from the Photography Graduate Critique.

A graduate education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a play in contrasts. The experience feels intimate—but your possibilities are vast, with 33 graduate degree and certificate programs across 24 departments, and opportunities to work and collaborate across disciplines. The approach is experimental yet rigorous, grounded in a conviction that we can define the future and redefine the past. At SAIC, we challenge, debate, and create within the context of what matters in the world today. We live art and design—and we break out of the art-world bubble.

Three Pathways

You’ll pick a pathway at SAIC: studio, design, or academic. Whichever yours is, you’ll be interacting and collaborating with peers across the School, whether you’re studying Visual and Critical Studies and participating in studio critiques, or you’re on the design pathway with a focus on Fashion, Body and Garment and an interest in new technologies.

Studio

The Master of Fine Arts in Studio lets you specialize in a single field or work across departments to create hybrid processes and products—or even switch your area of focus. How does this work? You enter SAIC through the department that most closely aligns with your current focus, but you’ll be encouraged to explore the possibilities that other departments and their facilities offer as you grow more certain of the ideas and ethos that feed your work. Each semester, you can choose an advisor from any department, so the mentorship you receive closely aligns with your interests.

Either way, you’ll be studying with peers and faculty who are committed to rigorous experimentation, in a culture where research is at the heart of that process and ideas are creative fuel. And whether you specialize or not, you’ll gain a deep understanding of the context in which you create that no single-discipline approach provides. 

Design

The design curricula at SAIC are future-oriented and rigorous. They’re more structured than the MFA, but still offer opportunities to take electives across all departments, making your education uniquely self-directed. This means if you’re coming from a specific background or have a personal interest in, say, speculative design or fashion as performance, you can carve out a path that gives you the skills and language you’re looking for. 

SAIC takes an integrated approach to design education. In introductory- and advanced-level studios, you’ll explore issues that impinge on the lives of objects and the people who use them: social and cultural, historical, economic, and technological.

Academic

A Master of Arts program at SAIC prepares you to become a leader in your field by advancing both scholarship and professional skills. These programs are designed to invigorate, inform, and activate you as you develop your identity in the broader context of a studio-arts environment that questions the status quo. Our graduates—writers and critics, researchers, teachers, and therapists—are creative agents of change.