Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts + Practice
The Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts + Practice is for students interested in harnessing the power of digital storytelling and media design for uses in diverse fields, from business to education, from architecture to medicine, from urban planning to law. The program combines the history and theory of 20- and 21st-century media forms with hands-on production experience and research. Students learn how to use video, still images and interactivity; they become critical makers and thinkers; and they join the research labs in small, mentor-led experiences that contribute to the creation of a robust capstone project.
The degree requires a total of 128 units, including a minimum of 14 lower-division units and 42 upper-division units in Cinematic Arts.
Media Arts + Practice Ph.D.
The Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice within the School of Cinematic Arts is a unique doctoral program offering a rigorous and creative environment for scholarly innovation as students explore the expanded field of the cinematic arts, with attention to design, media art, emerging technologies and critical thinking. A primary goal for the program is to define new modes of research and scholarship for the 21st century.
Core to the program is its transdisciplinary ethos; after completing foundational coursework, students design their own curricula, drawing on expertise across all six divisions with the School of Cinematic Arts. Students also have access to the School's state-of-the-art facilities and research labs, and they are encouraged to collaborate with students and faculty across the USC campus; current students have strong ties to the School of Architecture, the Roski School of Fine Art and the Innovation Lab within the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The areas of research investigated by Media Arts + Practice students in pursuit of their critically informed practice is broad, and currently include attention to these core themes: interactive architecture; media activism; database documentary; embodiment and tangible interfaces; games and interactivity; digital historiography; neuro-cinematics; expanded and spatialized cinema; multimodal scholarship; performativity; pervasive/locative media; and immersive journalism.
The Media Arts + Practice program is practice-based, and as such, students are encouraged to be creative and reflective in designing, defining and articulating their research methods. For this reason, the program seeks candidates who are interested in helping define new fields; those willing to combine theory and practice; and those ready to face the challenges of uncharted scholarly territory.
Media Arts + Practice is appropriate for students who are interested in both the theory and practice related to cinematic arts, and the emergence of entirely new forms of scholarship and creativity designated by this very broad term. Graduates of the program might expect join research labs pursuing innovations in media; they might teach in hybrid media/design/culture programs within academia; they might pursue their own creative practice; or they might work across numerous disciplines, lending expertise at the intersection of media, technology and culture.