Hello, everyone. Welcome to the University of New Haven Department of Art and Design and Jospeh Wollensky, Chair of the department. Welcome, today. I'm here in Dodds Hall, in Dodds room 203 -- one of our design studios, and this is where great things happen with our students. Well, welcome you today I'm gonna give you a brief overview of our programs, and look forward to any questions you may have.
Okay, well, I just want to give you a brief overview of our programs. And we want to start with this image here, which is a great example of our students interacting in coursework. You can see student exhibitions for our senior thesis exhibition, as well as some guest speakers that have come to visit and places that we've brought our students to.
Probably the best place to get a sense of our program is to visit us at unewhaven_artanddesign on Instagram. This is where you can see what we're doing, live and in person, and great events that we have for our students, their work, and places we go, and things that we do. So please follow us there.
Our programs are made up of a BFA in Graphic Design. Also, Graphic Design has a concentration in Digital Art and Design. We have a BFA in Interior Design. And also, Interior Design has a concentration in Pre-architecture. And then finally, we have a BA in Art. Our programs can be paired with many of our minors, including art, digital art, and design, graphic design, photography, and illustration.
Our philosophy is built around four main things. And you can kind of think about these as the four different years that you progress through our program. And these would be foundational skills, practice research, and professional practice. Foundational skills really have to do with learning the language of art design, not only ways that we communicate about it, but in the skills that you'll learn too. So, the types of tools you use, the elements and principles of design, how those get completed into different compositions. And this is a chance to really have kind of a level playing field for our students where they'll be building their skills in communicating, they're all going to be practicing the creative process, and also really thinking about how to critique their work, putting it up in front of their class, their peers, and instructors, and learning to really discuss and talk about it and think critically about the work they produce.
Practice has to do with the repetition of the creative process. So whether it's the design process, or thinking about art in different ways, students have to really come up with-- address a problem, create creative solutions to that problem through sketching and drafting and making prototypes. You need to critically analyze those things, and then make changes and edits based on that. So practice becomes something that gets repeated again and again. And through continued practice, we try to achieve some sort of technical mastery, and also heighten our skills of communication about what our intent is, and how we can have creative solutions to solve problems.
Research is very important for the fields of art and design. And this can be as simple as visual research, like keeping a library of images that inspire us, keeping sketches in our sketchbook, but it also reaches out into other fields and disciplines. So we certainly want our students to understand the wide variety of disciplines that they can engage to become content producers.
So our students are really thinking critically about the world around them and how other disciplines can lead to their work. And the end of it, they become content producers, where they are creating the ideas and the concepts behind the works that they make technically.
And finally, professional development is a key component of our programs that goes through all four years. So students are really engaged with learning from professionals in the field, we bring in guest speakers and guest critics to come to look at student work and give them feedback. We take students out into the field, they're going to design studios, they're going to architectural firms are going to artists' studios are going to museum exhibitions.
And then finally we're having them engaged with those professions as well through our internship programs, through our service-learning courses, and our experiential education projects. All of these add up to a really diverse and engaging professional development career. So we want our students to have those connections and to make those outreach connections before they leave our programs. So they really know the fields they are getting into and they have a set -- They're set up with connections before they leave.
We're really proud of our experiential education. You know, we have lots of museums, art galleries, architectural firms design studios that are close at hand in New Haven. New Haven has real cultural capital. A lot of things continue to go on. This is a few examples of our students in the Yellow Art Gallery, a few minutes from our front door, and always open and welcome to the public.
We're also in a really high-tech hub in New Haven. And there's a lot of really great startup communities and companies that are doing great things. This is a really amazing company called Lens Cloud, which is developing 3D scanning technology. And so we got to visit their studio and see their scanning facilities and actually have some of our students 3D scan. So we're constantly engaging with new technology companies, and really innovative ways of thinking and learning and bringing our students to see some of those sources.
We have an amazing campus in Prato, Italy. This was a great trip from two years ago in the summer, where three of our faculty got together and created a really engaging curriculum for our students, all about the innovations of Italy. And so students got to visit sites, from Pompeii to Rome, and Venice, they got to go see graphic design, print shops, exhibitions, and museums. And it's really fantastic time for them to experience art and design outside of the United States, and really bind together as a great cohort and group culture. We have lots of opportunities for our students to show their artwork to visit sites to engage with the landscape. And this is just a few examples of that, you know, we're perfectly suited between Boston and New York, Connecticut has a very diverse landscape and lots of opportunities for students to get and explore.
I think one thing that really makes our program strong are the connections that we have as a professional field. And this is just a quick overview of some of the internship opportunities that our students have made and are continuing to make and repeat. And these experiences lead our students to become professionals. So we're really excited about these partnerships that we have, and we look forward to working with your students to provide some of these great opportunities.
Well, in closing, I just want to thank you for coming out today to learn a bit more about the University New Haven Department of Art and Design. We have some amazing faculty that are here to talk with you further today about individual programs. If you do want to reach out to me further, please feel free to email and I'd be happy to discuss with you one on one. Enjoy your day and thanks for coming up folks. Bye bye.