Media Arts: Program Structure

• 40 credit hours including:
  • Three required courses
  • Optional internship (may fulfill up to four credits)
  • Required thesis, project, or comprehensive exam
• Full- or part-time enrollment (Full-time enrollment is typically 8 or 12 credits per semester.)
• Classes generally meet in the day or evening
• Fall admission only 
• Focus in audio, documentary video, fictional narrative video, new media, television production, or media studies

Master's Project

For many, the program culminates in a master's project. The master's project, which requires departmental approval and a minimum GPA, allows you to conceive, write, direct, produce, and edit either a video documentary, video narrative, music CD, sound design or installation, or one of a number of new media creations, including a DVD or an interactive website. Recent project examples include:

• A dramatic narrative shot in Italy exploring a young woman's journey back home to a small town where she struggles to assert her independence and artistic vision as she reconnects with her ailing grandfather
• A documentary exploring the challenges faced by an army recruiter under pressure to meet his goals in a wartime environment
• A documentary exploring the nature of laughter
• A fictional narrative that tells the story of love and treachery set among the black community in a Southern university town
• An audio documentation of the spiritual chants of indigenous Peruvians
• An online, interactive investigation into using video as syntactical language, as the user plays with virtual refrigerator magnets to make sentences that are then played out in short clips
• A study on the effects of notions of beauty on black women
• How owners of radio stations exert political power
• How photographic portraiture has changed with the advent of digital technology