Undergraduate Programs

A creative, innovative, flexible curriculum.

All students take core First Year Experience and then choose a major. In addition to a major, students may also choose a Minor to focus on areas where they have a particular interest.

For graduate programs of study, go here.

Pending final approval, programs marked with * will be available for students entering in the Fall 2025 semester to declare in 2026.

First Year Experience (Freshman)

First Year Experience (FYE)

MICA’s First Year Experience (FYE) is a foundation-level exploratory art and design program that supports the diversity of our community, the discovery of various learning pathways, and student curiosity.

Majors

Animation

Animation is as old as storytelling—and more relevant than ever.

Art Education 5-Year (B.F.A./M.A.T.)

The B.F.A./M.A.T. is a program designed to help students make the transition from artist and student to artist-teacher, one who can construct opportunities for others to make art and engage with it in meaningful ways.

Creative Media Production

The field of creative media production is more expansive — and more interconnected — than ever before.

Design and Innovation

Design touches everything — and its ability to solve complex problems has never been more relevant.

Ecosystems, Sustainability & Justice

Art and Design are perhaps the oldest and most powerful tools to address social justice and environmental crisis.

Fiber

Textile structure is expressive and physical. The connections between surface, form, material and meaning create a rich terrain to explore.

General Fine Arts

General Fine Arts at MICA allows you to follow your passion and create a unique artistic path.

Graphic Design

Graphic design is one of the most powerful forms of communication.

History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture

Students in this program become both artmakers and scholars.

Illustration

Illustrators bring ideas to life.

Interactive Arts

As an Interactive Arts student at MICA, you will improvise, innovate, experiment, and play as you create unique, interactive experiences across an array of traditional and emerging media.

Interdisciplinary Sculpture

Sculpture is contemporary art's meta-medium, where artists cross boundaries, invent hybrid processes, and explore innovative content in the areas of object-making, installation, performance, contextual practice, socially-engaged work, time-based art, and digital forms.

Painting

MICA's Painting Department is ranked as one of the best in the country, providing our majors with many opportunities and greater visibility for their achievements.

Photography

One of the first programs of its kind worldwide, the photography program at MICA was established more than 100 years ago.

Printmaking

MICA’s Printmaking major offers a comprehensive print media education delivered in an incredible new 20,000 sq ft facility dedicated to the art of Print, Book and Paper.

Studio and Humanistic Studies

Our Studio and Humanistic Studies major has been carefully crafted to help you create a conceptual and critical framework for inquiry into art and design.

Co-Majors

Architectural Design

The Architectural Design Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Design and Innovation BFA.

Film & Video

The Film & Video Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Creative Media Production BFA.

Game Design

The Game Design Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Creative Media Production BFA.

Graphic Design

The Graphic Design Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Design and Innovation BFA.

Product Design

The Product Design Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Design and Innovation BFA.

Sound Art

The Sound Art Co-Major is a paired program that integrates with MICA’s Creative Media Production BFA.

Minors

American Studies

Courses explore life and culture in the Americas through literature, art, visual culture, and music. Areas of study include Indigenous cultures of the Americas, religious traditions, African American history, exhibitionary studies, and popular culture.

Animation

At MICA, you can focus on traditional narrative/2D, stop-motion, or 3D animation, or combine approaches, and then dive into what best suits your creative vision.

Architectural Design

Architectural Design is a construction of relationships, spatially and materially, requiring the making (and revising) of things. It is a discovery…a search, a practice.

Book Arts

MICA's Book Arts Studio Minor is an interdisciplinary framework that allows students an opportunity to study the complexities of the book as a material object and conveyor of artistic meaning.

Ceramics

The Ceramics studio minor builds technical skills while honoring the interdisciplinary nature of your creative pursuits.

Creative Entrepreneurship

MICA’s Creative Entrepreneurship Minor: Empower Your Creative Future

Curatorial Studies

The Curatorial Studies minor is offered to provide professional development opportunities that expands students' experiences, research, and knowledge in the field of museum and curatorial practice.

Drawing

The drawing minor empowers students to continue developing their understanding and skills with drawing through individualized, responsive and inter-disciplinary pathways.

English Language Studies

An English Language Studies minor is a credential for international students who return to their home country and would like recognition of English language proficiency on their transcript. This minor is designed for multilingual students who enroll in language-supported sections of the first year LA classes.

Experimental Fashion

MICA's Experimental Fashion studio minor provides fiber majors a structured framework in which to explore the overlapping cultural domains of fashion, clothing, performance and costume.

Film & Video

A studio minor in Film and Video provides students with technical training coupled with a historical and critical examination of the medium.

Game Design

MICA’s minor in Game Design gives you the technical and artistic skills necessary to create professional interactive game experiences.

Gender Studies

Gender Studies offers courses that encourage inquiries into gender as a category of identity, and the ways that it intersects with other categories such as race, class, religion, nation, and sexuality.

Global and Intercultural Exchange

Global and Intercultural Exchange (GIE) is a Liberal Arts minor that brings the coursework of Humanistic Studies and the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture into an intentional and relevant curricular experience for students who are interested in investigating their experience of living and working in a global society.

Graphic Design

Design falls within a broad spectrum of practices, impacting multiple disciplines of study. Everywhere you look, designers are utilizing countless forms of media to communicate with the world around them.

History & Politics

Courses in the History & Politics Minor explore a wide range of aspects of history and politics, drawn from areas such as History, Art History, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and Literature.

History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture

MICA's curriculum in art history balances academic coursework and independent research with a significant studio component.

Humanistic Studies

The goal of a Humanistic Studies minor is to offer students the opportunity to reflect deeply on the themes and issues they encounter within a specialization.

Illustration

The Illustration department is distinct from other departments at MICA in that it is not defined by a specific medium.

Interactive Arts

A studio minor in Interactive Arts addresses the needs and interests of students from other majors to study and develop a basic understanding of how to integrate interaction into their personal art-making practice.

Liberal Arts

This minor is earned by all students through their Liberal Arts requirements. Students will matriculate into this minor during their first year, and then they can choose to focus on a particular area.

Media, Word, Image

Courses provide students with the opportunity to study a variety of artistic media and visual culture, including film and video, photography, print media, and more. Students are encouraged to critically analyze how various forms of media have shaped, and continue to shape, society as a hole, and our understanding of the world.

Narratives and Storytelling

Introducing students to the study of a wide range of literary and narrative genres, while also offering students the opportunity to explore their own literary voices through courses in creative writing, including poetry, short stories, personal essays, comics, and screenplays.

Natural and Built Environment

Students learn about the ecological interrelationships of the natural world through the study of areas such as ecosystems, environmental science, and biodiversity, and how the natural world has been shaped by various Indigenous traditions and societies, as well as more recent interventions such as landscape design and urban planning.

Painting

MICA's Painting department is ranked as one of the best in the country.

Photography

The photography studio minor recognizes those students outside the photography major who take a total of 15-18 credits within the Photography Department.

Printmaking

MICA's Printmaking department offers a broad range of studio experiences, from traditional to experimental, in our exceptional facilities.

Product Design

Think of all the things that we use (phones, glasses, coffee makers), that we used to use (kids toys), that we will use (assistive devices in old-age), that are used on us (medical devices, police body cameras), that we consider using (all the commercials for products we see but don't buy), or that we may never use but make us think (conceptual products in a museum gallery). All of those things were designed by a Product Designer.

Religion & Philosophy

Students engage in coursework that explores belief systems and religious traditions around the globe, as well as philosophical inquiries into the very nature of humanity. Classes include the study of political theory, world religions, aesthetics, epistemology, and more.

Sequential Art

Sequential Art is an art form that uses images placed in sequence for graphic storytelling or to convey information.

Society and Culture

Society and Culture offers courses that provide students with a broader understanding of human behavior and societal structures. Classes are drawn from several fields of study, including Anthropology, Economics, Social Sciences, Philosophy, and Psychology.

Sound Art

MICA's studio minor in Sound Art provides an in-depth grounding in sound as an expressive medium.

Teaching Preparation

Students enrolled in the BFA/MAT five-year dual degree program take the courses listed below during the first four years of that program. They are incorporated into their BFA degree plan as Humanistic Studies electives.

Humanistic Studies Specializations

Creative Writing

Creative writing has long been a core component of MICA’s undergraduate curriculum. Each year we offer several workshop-style seminars in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, and graphic narrative.

Critical Theory

When students pick a Minor in Humanistic Studies, they also select a specialization that can help them define the shape of their self-selected Minors coursework, as well as the selection of their advisor for their capstone thesis project.

Undergraduate Programs