A cross-disciplinary community of practice

Extend your practice, locate and expand its professional potential and explore your agency in forging the future of arts and humanities.

This professionally engaged, externally-facing programme brings you together with other creative practitioners in a trans-disciplinary, collaborative community that promotes a dynamic dialogue to actively examine how the arts and humanities can address current and future challenges.

You will identify and explore the professional realm that you and your work will operate within, and interrogate that context through live projects that activate and extend your practice. You will explore how you can engage audiences towards building a professionally robust, ethically sound and research-informed approach. The programme will encourage you to develop models and build networks that should help sustain your practice and research after graduating.

Your programme of study will be bespoke to you. A series of electives will allow you to align your research and practice with one of the School’s specialist areas of research. And College-wide electives enable you to build cross-disciplinary networks and engage with the knowledge and practices across the RCA’s four Schools.

The Master of Fine Arts programme seeks to challenge orthodoxies, actively consider how your practice – and the arts and humanities in general – might address the challenges of now and near future.

What you'll study:

Flexibility and choice are at the heart of the offer, with a combination of Core and Elective units enabling you to create a bespoke programme of studies that best suits your approach, context and interests.

Core units

The 180 credits that make up the programme are broken down into a series of 15, 30 and 60 credit units. There is the opportunity to engage with the programme via the one year full-time or two year part-time modes.

Core Units establish the principles and basis of the MFA programme. The Conditions unit asks you to critically analyse the history, context and philosophies of art through a global perspective taking into consideration current decolonial debates. The Positions unit supports you to identify and explore the professional realm you see your work operating within. The 30 credit Live unit is an opportunity to work in response to a live context, considering how your work will engage audiences.

Electives

These core units run alongside your elective units, which are designed to enable you to align your practice with one of the School of Arts & Humanities areas of research excellence:

• Sites and Situations
• Health and Care
• Material Engagements
• Curatorial Practices
• Wild Science; Art’s Digital Future

The multi-disciplinary communities of practice and research, formed around your choice of Electives, will help to develop networks that can further extend your work through collective and collaborative practice.

In addition, the programme offers the opportunity to further extend your research and practice through selecting units from a series of Cross-College Electives. These include, for example, units in teaching and learning from the MEd (Master of Education) Programme and Research Methods units from the MRes (Master of Research). In this way the MFA Programme is designed to allow you to tailor the curriculum to best suit the direction you intend to develop your work or practice post graduation.

Research Project

Drawing upon the learning and work established in previous units, the MFA culminates in the development of your 60-credit Research Project in which you generate a body of work, either independently or collaboratively, and present a reflection on your experience of the MFA programme.