UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES
GUIDING LIGHT
OF THE ARTS
MICA has become the college of choice for individuals who seek to engage in probing inquiry and creative learning while exploring their intellectual passions. The College is ranked among the best art and design schools in the world. Given its leadership status, MICA feels a special responsibility to publicly articulate a forward-looking art and design approach and to serve as a guiding light for arts education worldwide.
Its role as a leader is being realized in two ways. One is its ambassadorship for the arts to the national and international community, and the other is its leadership in the evolution of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Globalization (DEIG) arts approach. In these roles, MICA provides its students with the essential values of an arts education by:
- Providing a permanent skill base for its students in a changing world,
- Providing for self-discovery by its students, and
- Ensuring that students enter their careers with an intellectually diverse network.
As MICA leads the evolution of social responsibility in arts curricula, it is focusing on:
- Incorporating new disciplines into the art and design tradition,
- Fostering creativity through diverse thinking, and
- An unwavering commitment to access to education for students of all means.
THE
WORLD
NEEDS
DARING
MINDS
In every field of human endeavor—science and the arts, business and the professions, scholarship and public service—important things happen when daring, innovative, principled thinkers have the courage to step forward with new ideas. That is why, at MICA, we dare our students to dream boldly, push them to think broadly and deeply, encourage them to stretch their creative muscles and to take intellectual risks, and challenge them.
Creatives From MICA Join Others
to Fight COVID-19
As the Baltimore community began to confront the coronavirus pandemic in early March of 2020, artists and designers got to work doing what they do best—making. MICA artists used their unique creativity and ingenuity to help quickly fill a critical need for local health care professionals and hospitals.
For weeks, MICA faculty and staff used every resource they had to help create personal protection equipment (PPE)—namely face shields—through an alignment with Open Works, which was founded in 2016 to rebuild Baltimore’s manufacturing economy.
Foundation and Corporate Partnerships
Fostering relationships with foundations and corporations is an important step toward growing key projects of significance to greater Baltimore and the region. Among the College’s funding priorities are academic facilities and programs, scholarships, and unrestricted endowed and annual support. We are grateful to donors for their efforts to further the mission of the College.
MICA LEADS WITH INNOVATIVE SPONSORED PROJECTS
Center for Social Design
Across Baltimore, more and more people are getting the things they need to make their lives better. Those living in the city’s food deserts have better access to fresh, nutritional food. HIV-positive men are helping others move beyond stigmatization in order to stay healthy. Children in underprivileged communities have safer areas to play. The Center for Social Design (CSD) at MICA is involved in conceptualizing and delivering these important ideas in creative and concrete ways.
CSD utilizes a human-centered and collaborative process to understand and define social problems, identify opportunities, generate ideas, and make tools that support positive social change. The goal is to shift and enhance relationships between people and people, and people and institutions.The Center offers a Masters in Social Design, practice-based studios; and, post-graduate fellowships and project-specific approaches utilizing Social Design.
Product Design
MICA’s Product Design program capitalizes on the developing future of the industry, offering a hands-on curriculum that gives you deep knowledge of materials, processes, design thinking, and the ability to adapt to the changing needs of society. You become well-trained designers capable of reimagining objects or systems—and inventing new ones—that will shape the future.
The program works to support the integration of sustainable design knowledge and entrepreneurial intelligence with social good, all of which are cornerstones of MICA’s vision for the future. Students learn to design for multiple scales of production, and across various sectors. Product Design works in partnership with multiple departments on curricular and co-curricular projects including MICA’s groundbreaking Center for Social Design and the Fibers, Ceramics, Game Design, and Interactive Arts Departments. Externally, there are opportunities for students to collaborate with engineers and business students at both MICA’s Professional Studies programs (MAMBA, MPSBAD, MPSDAV, and MPSUXD) and other institutions including Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland, as well as government and industry partners, such as Stanley Black + Decker, Under Armor, and Key Tech.
Game Design
Working in a team-based, open lab model, students learn to make games from prototype to finished form and are able to focus on individual areas of interest-including game design, narrative, programing, art production, animation, sound, and more-as they work on collaborative projects with a variety of external partners. The curriculum, which expands upon MICA’s successful concentration in game arts, reflects the multidisciplinary nature of game development and draws upon the College’s renowned faculty in interactive arts, illustration, and animation so that students gain an outstanding technical and conceptual skillset in preparation for a career in Game Design.
Faculty Chairs
Future planning calls for eight new Department Chairs to lead and carry out a vision to produce more creative thinkers and contributors to the world. “What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.” Preparing for this current need, Chairs will guide faculty to explore the intersections of art and design with every industry imaginable to achieve MICA’s overarching goal:
We seek to fill term and/or permanent endowed early- to mid-career professionals in these exciting interdisciplinary fields:
Sustainability
Equity & Environment
Creative Entrepreneurship
21st-century African American Art
Experience Design
Critical Craft
Creative Learning Commons (CLC)
The Creative Learning Commons at 81 Mosher Street will significantly enhance MICA’s capacity to deliver a holistically supported, practice-based, and student-centered education that supports students, faculty, staff, alumni, educational and business partners, and the broader community. Completed in the fall 2022, CLC will co-locate synergistic units around a vibrant, cohesive, intergenerational and interdisciplinary resource.
Important programs will be strategically located in the newly-renovated space to increase collaboration and link services, activities, and a vibrant social, cultural and educational experience. Programs include:
First Year Experience
Center for Teaching, Innovation and Exchange
Center for Identity and Inclusion
Office of International Education
Center for Creative Citizenship
Joseph Meyerhoff Career Development Center
Ratcliffe Center for Creative Entrepreneurship
Art and Design College Accelerator (ADCAP)
MICA’s pre-college Art and Design Accelerator Program (ADCAP) is an intensive college-level experience designed to help high school students (sophomores through seniors) make the leap from just making it through high school to becoming college graduates. All ADCAP classes are college-level, and combine college preparedness training, targeted mentorship, specialized tutoring, and portfolio development to build their competitive application to a four-year undergraduate program. Students attend Saturday classes every weekend throughout the academic year taught by college faculty on campus in MICA’s studios and labs.
Ratcliffe Center for
Creative Entrepreneurship
The newly established Ratcliffe Center for Creative Entrepreneurship (RCCE) is designed to help train a new generation of artists and designers to become entrepreneurs, meet societal challenges, and empower students to forge creative and purposeful lives and careers. The Center is made possible thanks to a $5 million gift from the Philip E. and Carole R. Ratcliffe Foundation. Building off MICA’s dedicated commitment to helping creatives launch and develop innovative, socially-conscious businesses, the RCCE will be a comprehensive center to meet the evolving needs of students and alumni in the new creative economy.
Baltimore Creatives
Acceleration Network
The Baltimore Creatives Acceleration Network (BCAN) provides intensive support to Baltimore City creatives launching, developing or scaling their creative businesses. Using a tiered approach to success, BCAN’s programming is engineered to capture all creatives regardless of size, capacity and background.
The program offers a five-tiered approach to help creative entrepreneurs at any stage of their business plan, and is structured in the form of two cohort programs—BCAN Pilot and BCAN Founders Fellowship. Three additional programs provide supportive services available to all creative entrepreneurs—BCAN Help Desk, BCAN Mobile, and BCAN Connect.
These are a few examples of many significant needs in academic departments. To find out more, please contact Sara Warren or Nikita Grant.
Office of Corporate and Foundation Giving
MICA identifies and solicits foundation and corporate grantmakers whose areas of interest and support match our institutional priorities. We coordinate foundation and corporate activities at the College, including grant proposals, gift acknowledgements, liaison with matching gift companies, grant reports, and visits. Working with the Office of the Provost we provide grant writing assistance to MICA faculty who seek foundation support.
Contact us for more information
Sara Benninghoff Warren
Executive Director of Corporate, Foundation & Government Relations
Nikita Grant
Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation & Government Relations