OPEN CALL: New MArch and MFA Arts & Humanities programmes at the Royal College of Art

The new MArch Design Practice and MFA Arts & Humanities programmes at the Royal College of Art have been carefully created to benefit those with professional experience or students who have completed initial postgraduate study and now want to deepen their expertise.

Applications are still open for September 2023 entry. Find out more about programme requirements and how to join the RCA this academic year.

MFA Arts & Humanities
This professionally engaged, externally-facing programme brings you together with other creative practitioners in a trans-disciplinary, collaborative community that promotes a dynamic dialogue to actively examine how the arts and humanities can address current and future challenges. As a student you will explore how you can engage audiences towards building a professionally robust, ethically sound and research-informed approach. The programme will encourage you to develop models and build networks that should help sustain your practice and research after graduating.

Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world, as well as from mid-career artists and career changers. Given the interdisciplinary, outward-facing nature of the programme, alongside the ambition to expand the range of knowledges, approaches and positions that forge what contemporary arts and humanities might be, we also welcome applicants from a broad range of previous disciplines and backgrounds, beyond visual art. Find out more here.

MArch Design Practice
The MArch Design Practice is a one-year programme that supports architects, designers, and spatial practitioners’ creative and critical engagement with the design of the built environment. With climate as a central focus, students will consider how reuse, materials, waste, and embodied carbon intersect with economics, politics, and identity to produce new opportunities for design practice in the just transition toward a fair and flourishing world.

Students will critically engage with the planetary implications of construction and make bold, rigorous and informed design propositions through which a world otherwise can be built.

The programme welcomes architects, designers and spatial practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including those from other design disciplines such as sound, moving image or performance, with an interest in the built environment. Applicants from other backgrounds are also welcome, such as practitioners involved in local government, NGOs, journalism and activism. Find out more here.

Scholarships available
Career Progression Bursaries of up to 10,000 GBP are available for UK and Overseas students. Preference will be shown to those returning after a career break, career changers, parents returning to work, or those with a diagnosed physical or sensory disability.