Prospective Students

Greetings from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Notre Dame. Our department is a multi-disciplinary unit offering courses in Studio Art, in Art History, and in Design at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Each of the three areas within this department offers a distinct means of confronting and understanding the vital visual aspects of our wider engagement with and construction of the world.

Students working in Studio Art will develop skills in ceramics, painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture and will thereby learn to create those works of art that address our place in the world by primarily non-verbal means. Students of Art History will develop the critical skills that will enable them to frame manifold histories that privilege the visual evidence left by the past and found in the present and that continues to resonate through and to shape our imagining of humanity's unfolding story. Students of Design will learn the skills that can fashion the things we use everyday and that define the digital and print pages that we depend upon, such that these students, by industrial or graphic means, actually learn to shape our relation to the things used in this world.

While each discipline is distinct and marked by its own special skills and training, it is the conversations and synergies that emerge from our interdisciplinary encounters that make this department so central to the creative energy that can be found on the campus of Notre Dame. Undergraduate students may pursue course work leading to one of two degrees: the Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Art History, Studio Art or Design; or the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Studio Art or Design. Graduate students may pursue course work leading to either a Master of Arts (MA) in Art History or a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art or Design.

To learn more, we encourage you to watch the following video about our students and faculty. 

Please feel free to browse our website as you give thought to our programs. Should you have questions, do not hesitate to contact us at art.1@nd.edu.

Charles Barber
Department Chair
Professor, Medieval Art History