Financial Support

The university is an unparalleled resource in all disciplines of research to broaden and deepen the work of an artist. Graduate students in the Art Studio Program have many opportunities to interact with their peers in Art History, Cinema & Digital Media, Music, Performance Studies,and Design, through facilities/labs, exhibitions, lecture series, and course offerings.

The Art Studio MFA Program offers substantial financial support through paid Teaching Assistant positions each quarter and through Art Studio Program Fellowships, made possible by generous private endowments. Students may also apply for university support through Graduate Studies Travel Awards, the Davis Humanities Institute, and  the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.

UC Davis is an academic partner of The Headlands Center for the Arts, Graduate Fellowship Program, which offers a year-long artist residency for one of our M.F.A. graduates each year. Over the years, graduates of the program have won many nationally competitive graduate fellowships and post-graduate awards from the Dedalus Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation http, Skowhegan, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Roswell-Artist in Residence Program, and Eyebeam.

Collaboration and Resources

UC Davis offers an array of programs that draw upon its wide range of specialized academic fields. By stimulating cross-disciplinary approaches and using its distinctive graduate groups, UC Davis continues to follow and redefine the mandate of a major research university and is committed to the land-grant tradition on which it was founded, which holds that the broad purpose of a university is service to people and society.

The university is an unparalleled resource in all disciplines of research to broaden and deepen the work of an artist. Graduate students in the Art Studio Program have many opportunities to interact with their peers in Art History, Cinema and Technocultural Studies Music, Performance Studies,and Design, through facilities/labs, exhibitions, lecture series, and course offerings.

The much anticipated Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art will open in 2016.  It will be an institution dedicated to combining vanguard artistic and curatorial innovation with audience engagement. Exploring new means to connect visitors with art and participating in the process of art are two aspects of the new museum that are at the very center of its vision. The museum will encourage interdisciplinary exchange, provide means to make an impact on curricular development and create informal educational opportunities.

Faculty

The entire Art Studio faculty shares responsibility for the graduate program and teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses. Our faculty represents a diversity of approaches across all disciplines. Faculty include Tom Bills, Robin Hill, Tim Hyde, Darrin Martin, Hearne Pardee, Lucy Puls, Annabeth Rosen, Youngsuk Suh, Gina Werfel, and Shiva Ahmadi. See our People section for more information about our faculty and lecturers.

Facilities

The Art Department has facilities for the following media: drawing, ceramic sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, video, and sculpture. See our Resources page for more information about each facility and its equipment. 

Graduate students are also provided with large, individual studios on campus, located near the main art building. 

About the Campus

Located in agricultural landscape of the Sacramento Valley, UC Davis is located about an hour’s drive from Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco; a six-hour drive from Los Angeles; a two-hour drive from the ocean and equidistant from Lake Tahoe. Davis is situated on the floor of the Sacramento Valley, hot and dry in the summer and cool and rainy in the winter and is surrounded by fruit and nut tree orchards. Napa and Sonoma are close at hand.