Beaux-Arts MFA

The MFA Fine Arts Program is open, inclusive, and interdisciplinary. We are looking for advanced artists who are engaged and committed to exploring an art practice in its various forms, traditions, and contexts. We emphasize interdisciplinary critical dialogue and lifelong learning within our intimate community. Our Art + Social Practice emphasis is an optional concentration that explores and encourages collaboration and builds skills to work in the social field.

You will be simultaneously supported and challenged. In Critique, you will learn to discuss your own and others’ work and attempt to locate it within wider cultural debates. Individual studio meetings with faculty will offer you one-on-one conversations on work in progress, ideas, readings, or plans. In Art History and Theory seminars, you will read, write, discuss, and consider various histories, methodologies, and frames of thought. Professional Practices will prepare you to sustain a lifelong practice. Our Visiting Artist Lecture Series brings distinguished artists, curators, and thinkers into close dialogue with students. Studies culminate in a written thesis and final MFA exhibition.

All full-time graduates work in their own individual studios located at the graduate campus in Culver City. Residencies in Paris, Mexico City, and Anderson Ranch in Colorado are exclusively reserved for Otis graduate students and alums. A fellowship with the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena is also available to Otis graduates.

The mission of Otis College is to prepare diverse students of art and design to enrich our world through their creativity, their skill, and their vision.

At Otis College, we don't sit by and watch. We look at the world and look again. We get inspiration from everywhere. We need to make—and try everything. We work hard and work is our play. We experiment, we fail, and we grow. We use all the tools.

The city is our soul—Los Angeles—where dreams meet discipline. We don't just welcome, support, and include. Diversity defines us.