Call for applications: MA Curatorial Practice

In this extraordinary time of immense upheaval, rethinking, and potential revision of societies across the world, the role of curators and artists as first-responders has never been more urgent. Our task in the master of arts degree in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City is to train curators to meet the demands of our times to enter the professional field as curatorial practitioners fully prepared with the technical, historical, and theoretical knowledge to add productive, generative voices to a world of change.

Our hands-on training is joined with international fieldwork and internships with leading curators in major institutions throughout the world. Our students have opportunities to produce curatorial projects in New York and beyond. Our graduates go on to curatorial jobs at a global range of museums and institutions in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Our state-of-the-art space in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood is close by hundreds of galleries and museums, and our students have often taken on second internships at institutions of varying size and focus in the city, from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the New Museum to the Kitchen, the Drawing Center, and e-flux, among many, many others.

Our faculty and faculty at large include major curators, institution leaders, critics, and theorists, both New York-based and international, including Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy, Clémentine Deliss, Thierry de Duve, Chrissie Iles, Hou Hanru, Daniel Kunitz, Maria Lind, Steven Henry Madoff, Laurel Ptak, Sara Raza, Sara Reisman, Charles Renfro, David A. Ross, Noam Segal, Roddy Schrock, Terry Smith, Lumi Tan, Mick Wilson, Keith Whitmoyer, and Brian Kuan Wood.

Our Curatorial Roundtable includes approximately 60 international curators for individual sessions with our students—sessions that have turned into internships, project work, and jobs. These meetings offer our students a broad range of approaches to curating, ways of solving problems, and the opportunity to build a network of professional connections that would be impossible to create otherwise in so short a period of time.

Along with the Roundtable, we offer meetings with artists, courses in practical training for curating exhibitions across media formats, programming for institutions, collecting strategies, and considerations of non-exhibitionary curatorial projects, along with everything from lighting and exhibition design to grant writing, conservation, presentation-making, and several workshops in writing. All are taught by working professionals teaching what they do. Courses in exhibition history, art history, theory, and philosophy add depth to the practical training in the program. And all of our coursework addresses diversity and inclusiveness, with an emphasis on social equity, that we also seek in our students and those who come to speak and to teach. Fieldwork with the program includes a subsidized trip to a major international biennial prior to our international internships.

Our students produce curatorial projects both in our own space and in other venues, all subsidized by the program. As our program is part of one of the largest art schools in the US, our students can take advantage of the remarkable facilities of SVA and the range of students to work with across more than thirty programs and disciplines, undergraduate and graduate. Students often take on work within the New York art world and its unparalleled density of artists, galleries, and museums in close proximity to our space.

These experiences in the two years of courses and hands-on training truly prepare graduates to enter the professional world, gaining jobs in both small and large institutions nationally and internationally.

We offer the place and time to expand your thinking and skills as a curator, with an esteemed international faculty in one of the great centers of art in the world. We are now accepting applications for full-time and part-time students. We seek diversity of every kind, and we offer small merit-based scholarships. Our tuition is competitive with other curatorial master’s programs in the US. For information and to apply, click here.