MFA Creative Producing

The Film MFA Program in Creative Producing is a three-year program that takes advantage of Columbia’s unique geography at the center of the independent film world, with the mission of creating the next generation of producers.

The program emphasizes the role of the producer as the creative force behind a project, requiring business skills, the ability to form creative collaborations and an understanding of an ever-changing marketplace.

Our faculty consists of working producers in film and digital media, who bring to the program a wealth of day-to-day practical knowledge in all areas of producing film and television including script development, finance, physical production, distribution, and new technologies.

Students share a common first year with students in the Screenwriting/Directing MFA program, reflecting the faculty’s belief that the best training for producers includes work in all of these disciplines. It also builds friendships and professional collaborations that last throughout the program and beyond, and fosters the environment of mutual support and respect that we believe is essential to the creation of film.

Columbia University School of the Arts recognizes that Manhattan is part of the ancestral and traditional homeland of the Lenni Lenape and Wappinger people. The School also acknowledges that we are part of an institution whose spaces are funded, governed by, and named for families who derived their wealth from the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. By acknowledging the legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that have enabled us to gather here today, we are taking a small first step toward the long and overdue process of healing and repair.

The School of the Arts will continue to confront and address issues of exclusion, erasure, and systemic discrimination in our community through ongoing education and responsible representation. As a School, it is essential that we foster a truly creative environment where all are seen, heard, represented, and understood, so that our artists can focus their energy on doing what they are called to do: to hold a mirror up to society to interpret the world as they see it, while helping humanity envision a better future.