MA Contemporary Arts Practice in Stoke-On-Trent United Kingdom | University of Staffordshire

This dynamic MA in Contemporary Arts Practice will equip you with transferable and industry-relevant skills, including end-to-end creative project management, enabling you to become resilient and independent as a practitioner. The course is ideal for students with visual arts backgrounds, but also relevant to other arts-related disciplines. You’ll have scope to use a diverse range of materials, processes and approaches, and will benefit from working in a trans-disciplinary environment. There will also be plenty of opportunities to spark critical artistic discourse and explore cultural contexts by creating work through public encounters. Artists are instrumental in rethinking social and physical environments, helping to build cultural infrastructure through critical thinking. On the MA you will draw on issues you feel passionate about as a ‘citizen-artist’.The MA encompasses the vital relationships between the local and global, with plans for collaborations with partner institutions. Other forms of public engagement include connecting with groups and organisations in Stoke-on-Trent and London through fieldwork and residencies. On campus, you will have your own individual studio space, and access to our full range of workshops, enabling you to engage with digital and analogue processes and materials.The programme offers a sequence of core modules in practice-based research, providing methodological, theoretical and contextual foundations for developing a robust and relevant practice. Students gain practical experience through direct engagement with places and communities and develop their own creative directions through their final major project. Faculty and students build close and supportive relationships through structured critiques and tutorials, seminars, and informal conversations.CareersStudents are supported to build career paths connecting their art practice with contemporary cultural contexts. The MA could lead to careers in social and environmental justice, public policy, public art, curatorial practices, art education, art writing, urban planning, landscape architecture, and other professional and creative practices.We will support you to manage budgets and oversee creative projects, leading to possible work as a project manager, cultural manager or arts and engagement officer. You may also decide to continue your studies by specialising in research through a PhD.