PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS

 

Intermedia+Digital Arts [ IMDA ] MFA program

IMDA accepts applications for MFA candidates on a rolling basis until positions are filled. We offer students:

  • Newly retrofitted downtown Baltimore studios
  • State-of-the-art media campus facilities
  • Cutting-edge curriculum [theory and practice]
  • Engaged faculty
  • Teaching opportunities
  • Graduate Assistantships
  • Research Centers
  • Prominent visiting artists [including one-on-one critiques]
  • Vibrant Baltimore art scene
  • Financial packages [Due Feb. 1]
  • Professionally displayed thesis exhibition

Apply here. International Applications are due January 1st. Domestic Applications received by February 1 will receive full consideration toward admission and financing.

UMBC’s Intermedia+Digital Arts [ IMDA ] MFA program invites interdisciplinary artists seeking to expand or reinvent their practice to apply. The IMDA program is committed to art that poses unique conceptual and social challenges while offering an environment that provides artists a studio, teaching opportunities, courses in emerging methods, contemporary art and theory, engaged faculty and high-end research centers that are typical of a research university. During their course of study, IMDA students take advantage of Baltimore’s vibrant art scene, airwaves of analog and digital data, and the white walls of the prestigious Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), while pursuing issues such as food justice, the environment, transportation, urban communities, translation, race and gender identity, gift economies, and technology in both intellectual and formal terms.

State-of-the-art facilities in a variety of media-based disciplines result in forms that include street interventions, distributed networks, games, installations, performances, sculptural objects, prints, drawings, photographs, videos, interactive pieces, physical computing, and 3D maker output, public displays, and other socially engaged works.

Financial packages include Research Assistantships in teaching and research on a competitive basis. Students are also eligible to apply for a variety of internal research and merit-based grants to support their work. Non-Maryland Research Assistants, including international students, pay in-state tuition. For more information on financing see the graduate school website.

Prominent visiting artists present their work regularly and give one-on-one feedback to graduate students. Past lecturers include Janine Antoni, @rtMark, Stephanie Barber, Zoe Beloff, Michael Bierut, Catherine Chalmers, Paul Chan, Abigail Child, Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza, Paul DeMarinis, Tony Dove, Johanna Drucker, James Duesing, David Dunlap, Hasan Elahi, eteam, Karen Finley, Darko Fritz, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Dana Hoey, Nina Katchadourian, Matmos, Larry Miller, Alison Knowles, Margot Lovejoy, Joseph Nechvatal, Simon Penny, Keith Piper, William Pope.L, Michael Rakowitz, Andrea Robbins and 
Max Becher, David Rokeby, Paul Rucker, Mark Tribe, Ted Victoria, Fred Wilson, Martha Wilson, Karen Yasinsky and The Yes Men.

The most notable outcome of the IMDA MFA program is that graduates are prepared for a lifetime of creative productivity, having acquired the skills, focus, and commitment that will consistently propel their adventurous and personal artistic practices to a new level. IMDA alumni present their work at distinguished museums, galleries, festivals, conferences, and symposia around the world and have garnered support from prestigious granting sources including J. William Fulbright, Janet and Walter Sondheim, William J. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund; and Franz and Virginia Bader Fund. Many have also successfully pursued gallery representation, run their own galleries and artists’ spaces, and worked in the production industry. More than half of our alumni are successful as full-time professors and academic leaders at some of the most rigorous art academies and universities in the US and abroad, and they have been part of the early wave of artists to earn doctoral degrees in emerging fields of practice-based arts research, especially in service to digital media.

Contact us at imda@umbc.edu for more information. To schedule a tour of our facilities, click here.

University of Maryland Baltimore County [ UMBC ]
Department of Visual Arts, FA#111
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250

T +1 410 455 2150
imda@umbc.edu