Beginning in their first year, students in the B.F.A. in Collaborative Arts are introduced to concepts in traditional and arts-based research, theories of group development, and historical and current cinematic, performing and emerging media arts collaborations. Students are also exposed to professional artists’ research and production processes for making meaningful work. Continuing in their first year, Collaborative Arts students engage in required core training in multiple forms of storytelling, including: visual, digital, text-based and performance/movement. This first year lays the groundwork for further collaboration.

Required Courses: Year 1

In their second and/or third years, students work together in Collaborative Workshops, to investigate and research cultural and/or global perceptions, beliefs and traditions. These semester-long workshops provide students with a platform for discussing, refining, and testing ideas. B.F.A. students engage in ongoing training through tiered courses across the arts disciplines to support their work in Collaborative Workshops. In years 2 and 3, B.F.A. students choose courses in a minimum of two areas of study and practice among the visual, digital, text-based, performance, or movement fields.

Required Courses: Year 2 and Year 3

The final year of the degree program is a capstone project in which students pursue research questions in a group project of their choice. In this capstone year, students form working groups to research and investigate an issue of local and/or global resonance. Working as a collaborative team, students then apply their research towards an artistic response to that issue. Each working group is assigned a faculty project advisor who will support their collaborative capstone. Students present their final creative projects and research to the Collaborative Arts community and, as a group, defend their creative projects to a panel of faculty at the conclusion of the capstone year.

Required Course: Year 4

Collaborative Workshop 1 is a semester-long course introducing the participant to both disciplinary and multi/inter/trans-disciplinary art practices. The course functions as an exploratory space, challenging participants to live more fully and more immediately, vis-à-vis the development of single-authored and co-authored artworks. Students experiment with various artistic expressions and develop artworks in relation to: Object/Body, Space/Location/Time, Performance/Text, Color/Light/Sound, and Technology. Participants develop an appreciation for art as a valid form of research by examining various artmaking methods through reading, listening, seeing, and creating. By integrating the formal with the conceptual, historical with the contemporary, they make visible the possibilities and multiplicities of approaches in contemporary cultural production.

Collaborative Workshop II requires students to apply their training and work in multiple arts mediums based on a semester-long exploration of a chosen theme or topic. With an emphasis on play and process - students complete a series of classroom/studio projects based on specific prompts from the Instructor. These projects are designed to emphasize experimentation across the arts disciplines and to foster creative collaboration. In addition to class lectures and workshops, interdisciplinary guest artists are invited to share their work, inspire and support student projects.

The Fall 2020 theme for CW2 is "Creation and Reality."

Students work in groups to develop and present collaborative projects that creatively incorporate real-life material (for example: unscripted interviews, archival material, found footage or newsreel) as the basis for developing their co-authored work. Over the course of the semester, collaborative groups explore what it means to create original works from real-life material - examining how various mediums allow them to delve into this theme differently. The final project is a multi-disciplinary, co-authored work.

Info coming

Tier I

Tier I studio training courses are foundational Open Arts practice-based courses across the arts disciplines. All practical training/studio courses listed on the Open Arts course offerings website are Tier I courses unless specified as Tier II. Open Arts courses are open to any NYU student, so Collaborative Arts majors engage with students from various majors, artistic backgrounds and experience levels. Collaborative Arts majors are required to complete a minimum of 24 credits of Tier I & Tier II training to fulfill their Major Practice requirements, of which 4 credits must be from a Tier II course(s). Students must choose tiered training courses from at least two different disciplines (e.g drama and film; dance and media.)

Examples of Tier I courses include:

• Fundamentals of Filmmaking I: The Art of Visual Storytelling
• Choreography 
• Fundamentals of Developing the Screenplay
• Handmade Music
• Puppets and Performing Objects

Please note, for students who are interested in studio art, up to four credits of the Major Practice requirement can be fulfilled from within the Steinhardt Studio Art course offerings should they remain open at registration.

Tier II studio training courses are intermediate or second-level Open Arts practice-based courses across the arts disciplines. All Tier II practical training/studio courses are labeled on the Open Arts course offerings website. Almost all Tier II courses have a prerequisite to enroll, please refer to the course description for details. Open Arts courses are open to any NYU student, so Collaborative Arts majors engage with students from various majors, artistic backgrounds and experience levels. Collaborative Arts majors are required to complete a minimum of 24 credits of Tier I & Tier II training to fulfill their Major Practice requirements, of which 4 credits must be from a Tier II course(s).

Examples of Tier II courses include: 

• Special Effects Makeup II
• Playwriting Practicum II
• Fundamentals of Documentary Filmmaking II: Documenting Discovery - Directing & Producing a Short Documentary Film
  
• Intermediate Screenwriting
• Acting II: Advanced Scene Study

Performative Practice, co-taught by a choreographer and acting teacher, offers an overview of contemporary movement and theatrical practices. This course will address explorations of space and time, presence, working with objects, composition, dramatic action, emotional point of view, theatrical use of dramatic as well as non-dramatic text, various improvisational structures, and the connection between the body, voice and imagination. During the semester we will discuss seminal texts that have significantly informed the development of 20th century and early 21st century performance practices. There will be a final research paper (4-5 pages) on a subject chosen by the student in consultation with the instructors, based on the course readings and practical work.

Our collective intuition and imagination are more powerful than computer programs, yet paired with technology, software, digital media, and online networks, our wildest dreams can become real. By understanding the fundamentals of digital and interactive tools, our DIY sensibilities, artistic practices, and social experiments can be transformative, even revolutionary. With algorithms surveilling and dictating our culture, it is crucial to learn and harness digital technologies for independent expression. In this hands-on introductory course, we will learn to utilize tools for creating interactive musical and visual experiments, playful interactions and games, and emerging media discourse. Students will work independently and collaboratively to create and produce music and sound collages, interactive graphics and augmented reality experiences, internet art, videos and performances. Collaborators from different fields of study will be encouraged to incorporate their individual interests and expertise.

In this course, students form year‐long working groups to investigate an issue of local and/or global resonance to which they plan to respond as a collaborative team through their final semester. The first half of the semester students develop group literature reviews based on different aspects of the group’s chosen research issue/question. The second half of the semester, student groups develop an outline and formulate a project proposal, including budget, resource needs, production schedule and rationale for practical application of the research issue/question. This practical application/creative response is then realized in the final semester of study.

Filmmaking, photography, and the basics of visual imagery are explored through a hands on art-studio experience, which provides an overview of the development of visual storytelling throughout history.  From the first creation of early hand drawn cave paintings to modern film production, all the essential elements of visual representation, visual imagery, visual grammar, and visual narrative are explored. Lectures introduce and explain a variety of methods used to capture a visual image and how visual imagery, both with and without words, is used to convey meaning. In class painting, etching, drawing, film, and photo assignments are given for students to create their own visual imagery, using these several different artistic formats. Technical training on cameras and editing software accompanies these practical assignments. Students also complete several short film projects throughout the course, as they explore the essential nature of visual storytelling, pre-visualization, and practical production. The course examines how the basic tools of traditional narrative storytelling are also used in purely visual storytelling - to create a secondary world and to maintain a suspension of disbelief in order to inform, entertain, and affect the audience.

What does “Art” mean, and how does Art make meaning? WORDS AND IDEAS will undertake a playful grappling with the big questions: What is re-presentation? What is a positive representation—for whom, and how do we know? Why do we choose certain styles, mediums, forms? Should art please, flatter and delight or, conversely, challenge, shock and offend? We will begin to pull apart theories of mimesis (art as imitation) to enable us to be better-informed multidisciplinary artists. Because stories so often undergird how we make meaning, we will explore the concept of narrative—the dramatic scene in a play, 3-act structure in a film—and immerse ourselves in basic storytelling techniques. We will gain exposure to language that helps us critique art, contextualize art, explain art—with the ultimate goal of being able to articulate the intentions of our own art. To this end, we will encounter the major modern and postmodern “isms” (Realism, Expressionism, etc.) to discover what history can teach us to make us better 21st-century artists. The course alternates engaging, interactive lectures with practical recitations. 

This course provides a foundation in creative research methods by examining the range of concepts, theories and praxis of artists and other knowledge producers. Beginning with an overview of the research landscape, including traditional academic research models followed by a series of creative (or artistic) research case studies, this course will address key questions such as, What is creative research in the context of contemporary art practice and why is it important? How do artists define their research, and what social, cultural and political ideas influence them? What roles do collaboration, inter‐disciplinarity and audience play in how artists formulate their research strategies? How do artists gauge their results and what are the markers or processes for verification? How do the findings of creative research contribute to new knowledge applicable to a variety of disciplines?

Additional credits of Humanities and/or Science to reach the minimum General Education requirement of 32 credits.

(through TSOA's Department of Art and Public Policy):
8 credits required for Freshmen; 4 credits for Transfer students. *See “Expository Writing” for full policy.

Two courses for a total of 8 credits from one or more of these areas:
Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, English (except Dramatic Literature), European Studies, French*, German*, Hellenic Studies, Irish Studies, Italian*, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Music (history not theory), Philosophy, Portuguese*,Russian and Slavic Studies*, Spanish*, or other areas as defined in the General Education Guide for NYU Tisch Drama Students

*See “Foreign Language Policy” on how to receive Humanities credit.

Two courses for a total of 8 credits from one or more of these areas:
Animal Studies, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Child & Adolescent Mental Health Studies, Computer Science, Economics, Environmental Studies, Journalism (history or theory, not skills), Law and Society, Linguistics, Mathematics, Neural Science, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, or other areas as defined in the General Education Guide for NYU Tisch Drama Students.