Find the meaning in your work, and the momentum to move it forward.
This is what you’ll do in Lesley University’s MFA programs.
Emphasizing focused practice and discipline, Lesley University’s MFA programs in creative writing, photography, and the visual arts inspire and train you to deliver the best work you’re capable of. Here, experimentation and risk taking are encouraged. Thinking critically and voicing your interpretation are expected. And reworking and refining are essential to the creative process. Under the guidance of our renowned faculty, you’ll hone your craft, push your ideas in new directions, and gain the experience to take your work into the public realm. At the end of your program, you’ll have the confidence, community, and connections to advance your career as a professional writer, photographer, or artist.
Master of Fine Arts Programs
Live your work.
Arrive in a capital of culture. This is home base: Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city rooted in the arts. This is where some of the most acclaimed writers and artists come to live and work, and you’re a part of that energy whether you take classes on campus or participate in intensive residencies.
While at Lesley, you’ll find opportunities to explore the local art and literary scenes. In fact, to experience every gallery opening, artist talk, reading, or live performance, you’d have to attend 98 events per day. That’s because Greater Boston has more arts and cultural organizations per capita than any other city in the nation. Studying here means that you’ll be immersed in an artistic community that garners both national and international attention. You’ll have access to a wellspring of inspiration. And you’ll be exposed to diverse perspectives from fellow writers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, and scholars.
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Vigorous. Challenging. Exploratory. The turning point of your career. Your work is grounded in independent vision and practice. But in order to progress and evolve, you need exposure to fresh ideas. It’s through personal mentoring, rigorous critique, and passionate support from peers that new ways of imagining and creating arise. Close mentorship and collaborative relationships fuel our MFA programs, whether the format is low-residency or on-campus. Throughout your course of study, you’ll work one-on-one with acclaimed artists and writers who help you realize what you’re capable of creating. Having experienced what it takes to succeed in your field, your faculty mentors will push you to attain the highest level of craftsmanship and originality. Your classes, workshops, and seminars will be small and intensive, allowing you to engage deeply with fellow students, faculty, and visiting artists and authors. You’ll learn how to offer thoughtful critique and develop your ability to speak powerfully and knowledgeably about your work’s trajectory, inspiration, and intent.
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LUNDER ARTS CENTER
Creativity has presence here. 6 Graduate Programs in the Arts
Our Lunder Arts Center, opening in spring 2015, is the future home of the arts at Lesley. This new four-story building and connecting arts commons and library will contain classrooms, studios, digital laboratories, faculty offices, and flexible areas for collaborative work. Exhibition spaces on the ground floor will bring the public in to celebrate the arts. Located on bustling Massachusetts Avenue, right at the center of university life, the building is a reminder that you’re a part of a greater community. Its centrality facilitates working relationships among artists, writers, and scholars across disciplines, whether illustrators and children’s book authors or documentary filmmakers and nonfiction writers. You’ll develop connections that enhance your work and be surrounded by students who share your passion, your commitment, and your inspiration.
MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING
Take command of your craft. Ranked number four in the nation among low-residency programs by Poets & Writers, our MFA in Creative Writing nurtures and challenges your literary career through rich mentor relationships and interdisciplinary study. You’ll collaborate with MFA writing faculty who are prize-winning writers and passionate teachers. Alongside your peers, they will provide you with the rigorous critique you need to develop your gift. After two years of intense focus on your craft, you’ll have a compelling body of work. Many of our graduates have published books and works in prestigious journals, staged major productions, won literary prizes and fellowships, and found teaching positions or work related to their writing.
Fiction
Poetry
Be coached in the practice of constructing, analyzing, drafting, and revising short stories, novellas, or novels. Working closely with published writers who are also engaged and experienced teachers, you’ll develop and hone your fictionwriting skills within a passionate community of students.
Gain exposure to different poetic forms and approaches. Our curriculum doesn’t favor any particular aesthetic. Instead, you’ll be encouraged to explore as widely and deeply as possible. You’ll establish and continuously refine your vision while learning directly from internationally recognized visiting poets and faculty.
Nonfiction
Nikky Finney Author of four books of poetry, including Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award. MFA in Creative Writing Visiting Writer, 2012.
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Work in a wide range of genres: memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, food and travel writing, as well as researchbased narratives. You’ll gain a foundational approach to craft and practical tools that are informed by an understanding of the contemporary literary environment. By honing and deepening your material, you’ll give power to your subjects and stories and reach the widest possible audience.
Writing for Stage and Screen This program affords the unique opportunity to work on your scripts with local professional actors and directors. It’s also one of the few programs affiliated with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, where you’ll have the chance to be recognized as a playwright at both the regional and national levels.
Writing for Young People Study with award-winning faculty in the picture book, middle grade, and young adult genres. This program offers opportunities to write both fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults. Through intensive seminars and mentorship, you’ll master the art of developing compelling, emotionally rich stories that connect with young audiences.
Creative Writing Faculty Our faculty have written hundreds of books, screenplays, and stage plays, won scores of awards, and taught at the top MFA programs across the country. Read their bios at
lesley.edu/writing-faculty
MFA IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Anna Yeroshenko
Reshape traditions to define a new photography. Engage and interpret signs, symbols, and metaphors while exploring new ways to articulate your visual ideas. Joined by a community of artist scholars with a passionate respect for the history and handmade origins of photographic practice, you’ll learn to merge contemporary technologies with interdisciplinary studio practice and critical studies. You’ll discover that the new photography is more than a single entity—it’s an ideal nexus of art and culture, and it is you who will be reshaping and defining its meaning.
Tommy Matthews
Michelle Pritzl
Expand your expertise in art and photographic history, critical and professional studies, and the fluid integration of contemporary media with traditional and alternative photographic practices. Participate in intensive team-taught seminars. And expand your potential by studying with some of the most insightful and experienced photographers working today.
MFA in Photography Motivated by the premise that photography is in a state of flux, our program stands apart from the traditional MFA. Prepare to reflect, analyze, and articulate your own artistic and cultural beliefs while actively defining the “new photography.” Expand the professional skills you’ll need to live the life of a working artist through teaching assistantships and fellowships. And develop your craft through the mentorship of core faculty and internationally recognized visiting artist scholars who will work with you throughout each semester.
This is the work our students make happen. Cotton Miller
Anne Eder 11 Graduate Programs in the Arts
MFA IN VISUAL ARTS
Speak your own visual language. Question and expand your artistic process while developing a broad network of art dialogues and contacts. Work independently, with discipline and focus, and advance your study of art history, culture, and critical thinking. This is where you’ll move your career forward—not by following someone else’s approach, but by crafting a studio and academic plan that’s specific to your own point of view.
Alison Beste
Andrew Yang
Each semester, during a 10-day residency, you’ll meet leading artists and critics. Guided by internationally renowned faculty and acclaimed visiting artists, you’ll be empowered to experiment with new media, acquire critical vocabulary, and take your work out into the public realm.
Joseph Fontinha
MFA in Visual Arts Collaborate with MFA in Visual Arts faculty to develop a curriculum designed to get you closer to your vision. Integrate creative work into your daily life through independent study, and gain structure and support during your on-campus residencies. Participate in small, intensive seminars and critiques joined by fellow students, faculty, visiting artists, curators, and critics. And be exposed to new ideas about your work by a mentoring artist who will evaluate your progress and inspire fresh approaches.
This is the work our students make happen.
Brian Randall 12 Graduate Programs in the Arts
Judie Bamber
Writing may be a solitary craft, but working within a community of Lesley faculty and fellow writers gave me the inspiration I needed.
During the third semester of her Creative Writing MFA program, Sara attended a seminar on campus that planted the idea for a young adult novel. That novel, If You Could Be Mine, tells the story of two teenage girls who are desperately in love, set in Tehran, Iran, a very dangerous place to be gay. Sara, who is gay and came out as an undergraduate, says she was moved to write the novel both as a way to confront the stereotyping of gay, lesbian, and transgender people and to address the stereotypes of people from the Middle East. Her novel was published by Algonquin Books in fall 2013, was profiled in numerous reviews, including the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and won two Triangle awards and a Lambda Literary Award.
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“ Livelihood and creative work don't always completely
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coincide, especially right after graduation, but Lesley’s MFA program helped me to be aware of the need to maintain an artistic practice as a part of whatever I do.
Andrew Yang, ’14 Associate Professor, Liberal Arts School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Amanda King, ’14 Photographer Drawing on the empiricism gained from her master’s degree in environmental science, Amanda’s photographs meld personal association with the look of something objective. Using organic forms and the methodologies of a naturalist—collection, dissection, observation, and classification—Amanda builds visual languages that represent members of her family. Through the systems of signs she creates, she explores the metaphors and broader cultural constructions that arise from her family’s interactions with pieces of the natural world. Her work was recently shown in the 2014 MFA National Competition at First Street Gallery in New York. She currently teaches photography courses at Lesley University and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and works as a marketing associate at a Brookline-based technology start-up. 14 Graduate Programs in the Arts
Andrew’s work blends the realm of the visual with the biological, examining the ways in which science, culture, and art influence and inform one another. Having earned a PhD in Biology from Duke University, Andrew’s decision to pursue an MFA in Visual Arts stemmed from his desire to further question what defines nature and knowing. As an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he continues to explore the artist’s relationship to nature through his graduate and undergraduate courses, including Biological Semiotics and The Insect World.
“ After my PhD, I made a conscious decision to teach at
colleges of art and design, because I feel that there’s a deep, abiding, and still largely unexplored connection between the way that science, as another form of culture, informs the way that artists operate in the world.
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Sara Farizan, ’10 Author of novels If You Could Be Mine and Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel
ARTS PROGRAMS IN EDUCATION AND MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING
Educate and empower through the arts. Find new and meaningful ways to use your creativity for the common good. From educating children to helping people overcome life challenges to advocating for community programs, the applications for your skills as an artist or writer are both farreaching and significant. Our art therapy and art education programs integrate the creative process found in the arts with the practice of learning and healing. Available through our Graduate School of Education and Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, these M.Ed., MA, and certificate programs are nationally recognized and led by pioneers in the fields of teacher education and expressive therapies.
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Arts in Education
Expressive Therapies
As a nationally recognized pioneer in the field of arts in education, our master’s programs spark fresh, innovative ideas in classrooms and communitybased organizations. Learn how to integrate the arts into lesson plans to engage children’s criticalthinking and problem-solving skills, or gain the expertise to sustain nonprofit organizations that bring the arts to your community.
Expressive therapies has developed into a vital field within mental health counseling. By participating in the creative process found in the arts—including art, dance/movement, drama, expressive arts, and music—individuals cultivate personal awareness and a foundation for healing. You’ll learn from leaders in the field, gain clinical experience, and qualify to apply to become certified by national and professional associations and for licensure as a mental health counselor.
Arts, Community, and Education Creative Arts in Learning Integrated Teaching Through the Arts Teacher of Visual Art
Art Therapy Dance/Movement Therapy Drama Therapy Expressive Arts Therapy Music Therapy
C O M E J O I N O U R C O M M U N I T Y. L E S L E Y U N I V E R S I T Y. Want more information about our programs? Call us, and we’ll schedule an information session. C A L L 617. 3 4 9. 8 3 0 0 LUA D M I S S I O N S @ L E S L E Y. E D U L E S L E Y. E D U/A R T S