The Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Lens-Based Media is a two-year postgraduate program that focuses primarily on artistic and experimental lens-based practices (both still and moving image/animation) that embrace the use of artifice, formal and technical innovation, fictional strategies, and other unconventional visual approaches to create new and meaningful visions of the world.
We support visions that seek to move beyond the conventional narratives of our society and create new impetus in the viewer towards an open-eyed engagement with myriad challenges humans (and non-humans) collectively face in a world saturated with disinformation, increasing polarisation and fragmentations of communities, centuries-old political and social injustices, marginalisation of the most vulnerable, and a rapidly degrading global environment.
Such work is necessarily based on a solid artistic research practice: allowing makers to take responsibility for the specificities and narratives of the images they create in such work, and the complexities and histories of both the forms they employ and the topics they explore. However fictional the worlds we create, we must take responsibility for their claims to truth.
The course is taught by core tutors with a wide range of lens-based practices. Course director, Simon Pummell, is a BAFTA winning filmmaker and animator and 2008 Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. Cihad Caner’s still and moving image works have been exhibited at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Kasseler Kunstverein and EYE Filmmuseum. Sabine Groenewegen is an artist, filmmaker and editor whose feature film Odyssey (2018) won the Doclisboa Doc Alliance Award for Best Film. David Haines is an award-winning artist who has exhibited at venues including the British Museum, Drawing Room London and EMST (Athens). Etienne Kallos’ work has been screened widely at many international film festivals. He won the Corto Cortissimo Lion for best short film at the Venice Film Festival. Ine Lamers’ work has been exhibited widely, including at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Akureyri Art Museum. Laura Huertas Millan is a 2016 Harvard Film Study Center Fellow whose work stands at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art and research. Barend Onneweer works closely with artists and filmmakers as a visual effects designer through his company R3MWERK. Rossella Nisio’s moving image works have been screened internationally and are included in the EYE Filmmuseum’s collection. She is a current resident of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). Steve Rushton’s publications include Experience, Memory, Re-enactment (2005) and Masters of Reality (2011). Natasha Soobramanien’s collaborative novel Diego Garcia (2022), co-written with Luke Williams, won the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize. Stefanos Tsivopoulos represented Greece at the 55th Venice Biennial, and has exhibited extensively in art institutions and film festivals worldwide including documenta 14 and Manifesta 8.
As well as our core tutors, a wide range of international artists and filmmakers are regularly invited to the program. For a list of recent guest tutors please visit our website.
You will find the application requirements and procedure online here.
Deadlines
Priority deadline for completed applications of EU applicants and final deadline non-EU applicants is March 7, 2023. Final deadline for completed applications of EU applicants is May 10, 2023.