MICA will teach you how to make a good life and a good living through your creativity and art. This is where you gain a legendary fine arts foundation, technical skill and mastery, and the knowledge and experience that make MICA graduates sought after by employers. You develop a challenging studio practice plus—plus rigorous liberal arts, plus creative experiential learning— internships, applied research, in-the-field community projects, and entrepreneurial ventures. You have the freedom and encouragement to explore and integrate fine arts, applied arts, and liberal arts and sciences in highly individualized ways. And through our exchange with 14 other Baltimore colleges and universities, you have even more options for customization. It’s an only-at-MICA education that makes you exceptionally knowledgeable, experienced, and capable, no matter what field you enter.

MICA’s resources, curriculum, and partnerships give you unparalleled opportunity to make a positive impact through your creativity. Now, more than ever, art and design can drive solutions across industries and throughout society. But many creatives lack the necessary skills and experience to lead and collaborate on critical issues. Not so for MICA grads. This is the birthplace of social design, where you’ll tackle real-world challenges while gaining incredible work experience and industry connections. MICA’s Center for Creative Impact brings students, faculty, community leaders, and industry partners together to create solutions, innovation, and progress in areas ranging from public safety to healthcare to food security to space travel.

Our Ratcliffe Center for Creative Entrepreneurship connects resources and training so MICA students and alumni can grow creative ideas into viable businesses. We also offer a Creative Entrepreneurship minor that students can pair with any major to deepen their creative, critical thinking, and business skills so they’re equipped to thrive as an artist, designer, business owner, or community organizer. In partnership with Johns Hopkins, we’re the first art and design school to offer an MA/MBA in Design Leadership. Through all of these programs and more, MICA is cultivating a new generation of artists and designers who seamlessly integrate problem solving, innovation, and entrepreneurship with contemporary approaches to art, design, and media.

Entering our third century, we have a legacy that has built one of the most influential art and design hubs in the United States. MICA has sparked a dynamic ecosystem that continues to grow through the creative impact of our faculty, alumni, and students. As a student and alum, you are forever part of this powerful ecosystem that launches and draws some of the most talented creatives in the world. As an anchor institution in our home city of Baltimore, MICA makes you an immediate insider with access to projects and networks that allow you to get involved and contribute your creativity in meaningful ways—right away. Not only is Baltimore ranked as one of the best places to go to college, it’s fittingly nicknamed B’More, which is exactly what you can do here — be more and do more.

At MICA, collaboration, camaraderie, and community are baked in. Starting with the College’s approach to portfolio critiques, MICA meets students where they’re at. You’ll have incredible faculty mentors—working artists and industry leaders who are truly interested in your ideas and where you want to take them. You’ll have extraordinary fellow creatives, resources, and facilities. And you’ll have the freedom and encouragement to make the most of your education, cultivating your craft and original thinking. In an age of artificially generated creativity, that matters more and more. Personal is powerful here. When you come to MICA, you don’t fit into a mold that’s already been created. You make your mark on MICA, and we make room for you to come into your own. Our entire community is committed to helping you achieve your creative ambitions.

Want to think fast, navigate ambiguity, thrive in environments where complexity is the norm, see the big picture while tending to the smallest details, synthesize information quickly and effortlessly, combine disparate ideas to create solutions others overlook, all while pursuing what you love? Does this sound like a superpower? Well, it is. It’s the kind of superpower you gain from a MICA education. It’s why our graduates consistently go on to top graduate schools like Harvard, UCLA, and Yale. Why we’re a top Fulbright producer. It’s why our alumni become successful painters, sculptors, graphic designers, biofabricators, animators, architects, filmmakers, curators, researchers, scholars, teachers, scientists, CEOs, lawyers, policymakers, writers, and musicians. And why they thrive in settings as diverse as Apple, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Dreamworks Animation, Google, IBM Research, the Johns Hopkins Institute of Nanobiology, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, LucasArts Entertainment, Museum of Modern Art, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, National Geographic, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, and Whole Foods. It’s an only-at-MICA education that empowers creatives to make breakthroughs, to make meaning, to make waves, to make connections, and to make their lives and the world better.