OUR MFA PROGRAM supports 12 graduate students per year, and strives to graduate working artists who will continue to demonstrate significant artistic, critical and cultural impacts across a wide array of disciplines. Incoming MFA students are expected to already be deeply engaged in their creative practice and possess the technical proficiency in their chosen media. Graduate coursework and independent study are designed to help students develop a critical understanding of their creative work in the multiple contexts of specific localities and global contemporary art. Our graduate students are encouraged to take university-wide and cross-disciplinary courses linked to their research interests, studying and collaborating with faculty and graduate students in areas as diverse as Geography, Environmental Sciences, Classics, Art History, Disability Studies, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Interactive Design, Rhetoric, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature.

The Program seeks to help students develop a keen sense of their audience and to consider how they will reach, or generate, that audience for their work. Art Practice faculty will help to facilitate the exposure of graduate student work to a broader public, whether in museums, galleries, public places, or through other forms of engagement and dissemination.

Peer-to-peer discussion and critique form the heart of Berkeley's MFA Program. Students respond to their classmates' work, learning to think, speak and write critically about art's functions and possibilities. A Visiting Artist Lecture Series, along with studio visits, offer graduate students the chance to connect with internationally-known artists. Students will also have the opportunity to teach in during their time here, mentored and closely supported by a faculty member. Exhibitions in the first and second year of study require students to maintain a rigorous pace of creative research and establish a professional art practice. The final thesis exhibition, completed after the second year of study, is held at the Berkeley Art Museum.