American Film Institute

The American Film Institute is a nonprofit film organization founded in 1967 in Los Angeles, California, after a National Endowment for the Arts and White House effort to support American moving-image culture. Its graduate teaching arm, the AFI Conservatory, occupies a hillside campus in Los Feliz, the former Immaculate Heart College grounds, a short distance from Hollywood studio lots. The Institute was created to preserve film heritage and to train filmmakers, and the Conservatory remains a specialist graduate school rather than a multi-faculty university.

Study is organized by craft: cinematography, directing, editing, producing, production design, and screenwriting. Fellows cycle through narrative short-film productions that use campus soundstages, cutting rooms, and the theater. Institute programs such as the AFI Catalog of Feature Films sit beside the school, but graduate work is the Conservatory workshop, with discipline heads drawn from film and television crews.

The Conservatory enrolls a few hundred fellows at a time, nearly all in master's study, including a large international group. Teaching staff are working cinematographers, editors, producers, and directors. Alumni who trained there include David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Darren Aronofsky.

The degree associated with the Conservatory is a two-year Master of Fine Arts, taught as continuous production rather than a lecture-heavy load. Supervision comes from discipline faculty and visiting filmmakers. The year follows a production calendar of team-made films. Fellows live and work in Los Angeles, using the city as the setting for crews, festivals, and postproduction houses.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, American Film Institute lists 2 graduate programs in film & filmmaking, all of them master's programs.