University for the Creative Arts

The University for the Creative Arts is a specialist public arts university in England, with teaching in Epsom, Farnham, and Canterbury. It was formed in 2005 by merging the Kent Institute of Art and Design and the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, themselves descended from nineteenth-century art schools. It is a creative-arts institute with a multi-town campus network in the South East, not a collegiate or comprehensive civic university.

Academic organization is by school and subject: fine art, fashion, architecture, film, animation, graphic design, crafts, and related creative business. Fashion studios at Epsom, architecture and fine art at Canterbury, and a broad workshop range at Farnham are the concentrations graduate students choose among. Ateliers, workshops, and film studios function as the equivalent of research laboratories.

Enrollment is about 6,000 to 7,000 students, including a large international cohort, especially from East and South Asia and Europe. Taught postgraduate students outnumber research students. Academic staff are practitioner-teachers as well as researchers. Alumni work in British and international fashion, design, architecture, and the visual arts, following the older art-school pipeline into studios and agencies.

Graduate study is mainly taught master's degrees (MA, MSc, MArch) with studio and dissertation components, plus MPhil and PhD by practice or thesis. The academic year follows the English two-semester pattern. Some research students hold Arts and Humanities Research Council or university studentships; many master's students are self-funded. Epsom and Farnham are small Surrey towns on the London commuter belt; Canterbury is a cathedral city in Kent, so studio life is campus-based with London galleries a train ride away.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University for the Creative Arts lists 1 master's program.