LIFE AT RISD
Welcome to some of the best years of your life. Creative people all over the world tend to attract each other, choosing to live and work near others who love to make things, share ideas and express themselves artistically. At RISD you’ll join a great creative community that will expand every aspect of your experience here, whether you’re working with your friends in the studio, talking about art at a gallery opening, relaxing over a good meal or just hanging out with your friends. Life at RISD is good. It’s intense, inspiring, insanely fun and totally infectious.
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R I S D h o u s in g o f f e r s u lt i m at e f l e x i b i l i t y a nd c o n v e ni e nc e .
Since studios and other campus buildings are decentralized – sprinkled around College Hill, along the Providence River and downtown – housing options are equally well distributed in buildings that accommodate as few as 17 and as many as 500 students each. RISD housing offers a step up from basic dorm living, with large rooms, engaging communities, a variety of work and lounge spaces and a range of living styles to meet the specific needs of art and design students. Freshmen live in designated houses or the Quad – a cluster of four connected residence halls with a choice of single or shared rooms in either traditional or suite-style configurations. For upperclass and graduate students, the options range from the communal atmosphere of the historic Hill Houses (renovated homes from the 1800s) to the classic brick Benefit Street Apartment complex, the townhouse style of Charles Landing, and the more urban feel of our riverfront living/learning center above the RISD library at 15 Westminster Street. risd.edu/housing
You’ll find a wide range of on-campus housing options at RISD, from comfortable rooms and lofts in the large 15 West residence hall to small studios and apartments in renovated brownstones on Benefit Street.
offers a satisfying means of not only meeting your daily nutritional needs, but of coming together as a community to connect over delicious food. Meeting the needs of our creative community inspires RISD’s chefs and other culinary professionals to go beyond the expected. Nationally recognized as a leader in the field, RISD Dining offers fresh ingredients in dishes made to order and fully supports sustainability and local food producers.
D inin g at R I S D
Since students often work late into the night, various campus cafés are open from early morning until after midnight.
At The Met, our main dining hall, you’ll find traditional, vegetarian and vegan options, an artisan pizza oven, salad and deli bars and a huge choice of desserts and pastries made from scratch. Other campus dining spots include Portfolio Café for bistro-style fare, Watermark Café for local and organic meals and the Jolly Roger Café for artisan sandwiches and more. In addition, the student-run Carr Haus Coffee Shop is the perfect place for inexpensive coffee, tea or a quick snack. risd.edu/dining
good food
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without plenty of openings, either at the RISD Museum or one of more than a dozen student-focused galleries throughout campus. Going to early evening openings is a great way to interact informally with other students, faculty, staff and the general public, while getting inspired by good conversation and interesting works of art.
Off campus, RISD students and alumni contribute to the vitality of local arts organizations such as AS220, The Steel Yard and New Urban Arts, where art, music and making mingle almost nonstop. The city’s monthly Gallery Night events also provide fun opportunities to connect with the local arts scene. risd.edu/galleries
The historic charm of Woods-Gerry Gallery offers a great backdrop for a weekly rotation of shows focused on individual departments or groups of graduating seniors, while the Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery is a centrally located contemporary space open for student-curated shows of work by their peers. The Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery downtown shows great new work being produced in RISD’s masters’ programs. And many academic departments also run galleries that showcase work in specific media.
creative community RISD’s Center for Student I n vo lv e m e n t (C S I ) helps students explore activities beyond the studio, from student government to event programming, team sports or any of the many other clubs and initiatives students are motivated to organize. It’s just one of several arms of RISD that help support, enrich and complement your academic experience here.
Beyond the studio, you’ll also discover plenty of opportunities to get involved in theatrical productions, contribute to the online student newspaper, do volunteer work off campus, curate exhibitions, play music with friends – basically, to create as fulfilling a co-curricular life as you can handle on top of intense studio work. RISD’s Career Center offers a range of dymanic workshops and programs to help you find meaningful internships and think about the future well before senior year.
Providence itself is a great place to make community connections. It’s home to RISD, Brown University just up the hill and three other colleges and universities, making it a very youth-oriented city – and one that’s big enough to have a lot going on but small enough to feel intimate. Just south of Boston and a few hours north of New York, Providence has its own distinctive character, with interesting architecture, a river running through the middle, great restaurants and good music. And thanks to RISD and the high number of artists and designers per capita, it’s widely known as “the creative capital.” csi.risd.edu risd.edu/careercenter