Students entering Parsons share a common first-year experience. The same course sequence constitutes the first year of every BFA and BBA program, providing a foundational experience that familiarizes students with the tools, methods, and skills of art and design. First-year courses prepare students for life as skilled and socially aware artists and designers. Classes focusing on broadly relevant design concepts, tools, and methods—including studios exploring 2D and 3D processes, drawing, and digital design as well as liberal arts seminars—bring together students who are passionate about all kinds of art and design and who will one day forge new paths in an array of disciplines.
Drawing on the breadth and depth of expertise in design theory and practice at Parsons, this new Master of Arts program offers students the opportunity to explore design as both a field of scholarly research and an agent of social change.
Launched in fall 2010, this Master of Arts program allows students to engage in the evolving field of fashion studies. Using an interdisciplinary approach, students explore fashion as object, image, text, practice, theory, and concept and develop a critical understanding of fashion and its complex global intersections with identities, histories, and cultures in the contemporary world.
Offered jointly with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the History of Design and Curatorial Studies program leads to a Master of Arts degree. Graduates go on to careers as historians, curators, and scholars in museums, universities, historic houses, auction houses, and galleries.
Part-time faculty member Jeffrey Rosenfeld took his Design for Aging Populations class on a tour of 305 West End Avenue, a nationally recognized Senior Residence....
Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE Explores the zoomorphic imagination and image-making of Eurasian nomads and their...
Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and...
Recently published by Routledge, Caroline Dionne’s book Design Theory, Language and Architectural Space in Lewis Carroll offers spatial theories of the emergent based on a...
Robert Smithson, Land Art, and Speculative Realities, a new book by Rory O’Dea, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Design at Parsons, was released on...
Greg Newton is co-teaching a pilot section of Laboratory 2 called Words and Works. This new course combines Laboratory 2 and Critical Reading and Writing…
Susan Yelavich, visiting critic at Milan’s Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) since 2007, has been invited to return to NABA this March. With Milanese…
Assistant Professor of Art and Design Studies Sarah Lichtman was the consultant curator for Mid-Century Style and Studio Pottery, an exhibition that took place at…
This exhibition showcases twelve contemporary artists of Chinese heritage, who over the last two decades have established their careers in the global metropolis of New…
Yelavich, Susan. “Death and the Museum,” in Animal Logic. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) NEED PAGES. The Swatch Watch,” in Design Studies Reader, eds….
‘Global Design History: A Travel Perspective’ in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, Sarah Teasley (ed.), Global Design History, London: Routledge, 2010 (in progress) ‘Tokyo 1964 Olympic…
Lichtman, Sarah. “Reconsidering the Design History Survey,” The Journal of Design History 22, no. 4 (2009): 341-50. Special issue of the Journal of Design History,…
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009). “Madame Récamier et les femmes de la haute société au…