Digital+Media MFA

Digital+Media, RISD’s newest graduate department, explores innovative approaches to digital media and cutting-edge contemporary theory and practice. Expanding on a media art focus, the vision of the program is to provide a diverse environment for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary exploration of digital media. The program includes a central curriculum and facilitates bridges to other existing departments at RISD, enabling individual inquiry, high-level collaboration and team-based media production. The program unfolds over a highly engaging two-year course of study.

The goal of the department is to provide a resonant environment for cutting-edge artistic research and practice, focusing on the creative, expressive potentials of digital media. The program has an emergent focus – hybridizing, redefining and re-articulating the digital arts as an ongoing pursuit. It fosters exploratory work which seeks to exhibit a high degree of innovative visual, sonic, and/or textual expression, conceptual clarity, and technological skill. The continuum between physical space and digital space is also examined and explored.

Students draw from a number of potential study areas to define their own personal and/or team-oriented practice. Current research areas defined for exploration in the program include: interactive digital media; virtual environments; augmented reality; motion graphics; digital audio production; Internet-oriented authorship; hybrid architectural/media environments; new forms of sensing and physical interface production; experimental media-related industrial design; ubiquitous computing as an expressive form; experimental games; wearable computing; new forms of literary media production; expressive digital tool building; installation art; digital media research; and the exploration of new forms of computer-related expression.

The Digital+Media program is facilitated by top practitioners in the field who are drawn from many disciplines. A cutting-edge Lecture Series and visiting artist program examines the latest trends in digital media production as well as provides a critical/historical context for the understanding of current digital art and expanded media design practices. Critical cultural reflection is central to the goals of the program and related theory courses are presented in conjunction with digital studio practice.

Self-motivated graduate level media production, individual and group feedback, team teaching, local and international media collaborations, visiting critics, as well as an exciting curriculum, foster a dynamic expansive approach to digital media production. Graduate students work independently and/or in teams under the supervision of a Faculty advisor and thesis committee. A major final thesis project (either individual or team-based), and a written thesis with multi-media documentation are required. The study of media history and theory complement and help to articulate the thesis project.

Collaborative Departments

• Architecture
• Art + Design Education
• Film/Animation/Video
• Furniture Design
• Glass
• Graphic Design
• Illustration
• Industrial Design
• Interior Architecture
• Liberal Arts
• Painting
• Photography
• Printmaking
• Sculpture
• Textiles

Collaborative Research Institutions

• Brown University
• UCLA
• Duke University
• University of New South Wales, Australia
• MIT

Students may also register for classes at Brown University through a special RISD/Brown exchange program.