What does it mean for you to be an Interdisciplinary Artist in the 21st Century?
The Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts (MFAIA) is a self-directed learning community that fosters a climate of ethical, lifelong, creative inquiry. We encourage artists to ask complex questions and cultivate practices that celebrate imaginative and intellectual discovery. Ours is one of the only graduate arts programs in the world committed to the arts as transformational practice and artists as agents of personal and public action.
Students, faculty, and alumni of the MFAIA program pursue practices informed by diverse traditions fueled by a broad range of intentions that include the social, the aesthetic, the political, the spiritual, and the deeply personal. We envision artists participating responsibly in every walk of life, in order to advance our collective understanding of what art is and can be, and to shape a more compassionate and equitable world.
Self-Directed
No two artists are alike and no other MFA program places you – the artist – truly at the center of the educational experience. Each one of our students designs and pursues an individualized course of study. Based on your unique personal interests, intentions, and professional goals, faculty advisors — themselves accomplished and evolving artists — work with you one-on-one, providing personalized feedback, guidance, and challenge. Reaching across conceptual, visual and time-based arts, we welcome all forms of creative practice, especially those that explore what art might be and how we can engage meaningfully beyond the limitations of any single discipline or tradition.
Integrated
The program is low residency: you attend an eight-day residency each semester, joining a creative and supportive community of diverse artists. This model serves artists who wish to integrate arts practice with other aspects of life. We encourage you to contribute your learning beyond the academy, immediately and directly, through action in your personal, local and/or global communities. Informed by philosophies of participatory, democratic education, our low-residency model not only accommodates complex lives, but expands our existing and varied connections to people, place and time.
Rigorous
Our learning community is committed to critically engaged research and practice. The MFAIA Program is designed to support each scholar-artist in articulating and engaging with your original vision as you stretch in new directions and refine critical, expressive, and process skills. These developments in your individual artistic practice are deepened further as you are asked to be attentive to the broad range of strategies and conversations that inform contemporary art at this historic moment.
Locations
Students can enroll in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts in two locations:
- Plainfield, Vermont, Goddard’s historic main campus
- Port Townsend, Washington, a vibrant arts community on the Pacific Coast - We invite you to learn more about the character of the PT residency site’s Community of Artists.
Upon entering the program, you choose one of the two residency site options for the duration of your studies. Each program site is home to a vibrant community of interdisciplinary artists and allows you to engage with a unique physical landscape in a retreat-like setting.
Goddard College programs operating in the State of Washington are authorized by the Washington Student Achievement Council. For more information, please refer to Accreditation and Approvals.