Graduate
The UNM Department of Art provides an environment where creativity, experimentation, and intellectual discourse flourish.
By cultivating a community of studio artists, art historians, and art educators, we recognize the advantages that are gained through the integration of disciplines and through broader connection with research units across the university. Our nationally and internationally-renowned faculty mentor a talented and diverse student body. Together we create an inclusive culture where creativity and critical thinking thrive.
Application Deadline: January 15
Virtual Open House:
October 30, 2024, 12:00-1:00 pm (Mountain Time)
Link: https://bit.ly/mfa1113
November 20, 2024, 6:00-7:00 pm (Mountain Time)
Link: https://bit.ly/mfa1120
The MFA in Art Studio is a 3-year interdisciplinary program with strong area specializations in Art & Ecology, Ceramics, Experimental Art + Technology, Painting & Drawing, Photography, Printmaking, and Sculpture. Students work with world-class faculty who are highly active and engaged in both teaching and research. All MFA students are granted individual studio spaces across two buildings with grad-only metal, wood, and ceramics facilities.
Funding is available through graduate assistantships/teaching opportunities which include a semester stipend, tuition remission, and health insurance. Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the UNM MFA in Art Studio program is part of a diverse and vibrant contemporary art scene at the regional, national, and international level.
Art History
Application Deadline: November 15
Open House:
The UNM Art History program emphasizes the study of art and visual and material culture as a means of understanding the intellectual and cultural history of humanity.
The MA and PhD programs in Art History offer specializations from medieval to contemporary art and in Art of the Americas with concentrations in various geographic regions, historical periods, and cultural contexts throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Art Education
Application Deadline: Rolling
Open House:
The UNM Art Education graduate program offers two options: an M.A. in Art Education with New Mexico Visual Art PreK-12 licensure and M.A. in Art Education without licensure. Both options promote a deeper-level understanding of art education, including theoretical foundations, contemporary art pedagogies, reflective practices, community connections, and contemporary issues related to the field.
Students’ interests and lived experiences as artists, researchers, and teachers shape the direction of their graduate program through pathways often overlooked in more traditional learning designs.
Confluence Low-Residency MFA
The Confluence MFA is not accepting applications for academic year 2025-26. Please contact Carol Padberg at padberg5@unm.edu or Mary Mattingly at mmattingly@unm.edu if you wish to be on our mailing list for future opportunities.
Graduate Student Takeovers
Follow our Instagram to see what our 1st year, 2nd year, and 3rd year MFA students are doing!
Luc Biscan-White is an Indigenous queer native Appalachian image-maker, forest ecologist, sociolinguist, and researcher. Sprouting from the Central Appalachia mountains of Southwest Virginia, Luc’s art practice questions the notion of individualism by reminding us of our communion with the natural world. In tandem with their interests in environmental sociology and sociolinguistics, Luc weaves together scientific methodologies, studio practice, and sociological frameworks to more holistically address environmental and social injustices, particularly in rural, queer, and Appalachian communities.
Luc is a graduate of Radford University receiving both their BFA in studio art (sculpture and analog photography) and BS in biology (forest ecology and plant conservation), with minors in Appalachian studies, French, organic chemistry, rural sociology, and women’s and gender studies. Luc is currently an MFA graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the areas of sculpture and art & ecology.
Saúl Ramírez is a second year MFA candidate for the Drawing and Painting Department at UNM.
Born in El Paso, TX, Saúl Ramírez has spent their life along the Chihuahua Desert, the Rio Grande serving as an anchor, and Juarez as their motherland. Their work weaves the desert into the place of its global narratives in history, mythology, and science which serve as critical forms of abstraction that are a base for the production of a painterly language, transforming abstractions into haptic and affective realities.
Their work is multidisciplinary, using writing, sculpture, photography, and video as modes of a painterly concern that foregrounds presence as a remedy against the ambivalence of the overwhelming present which lacks clear definition.
Emma Ressel (born Bar Harbor, ME) is an artist working with photography, re-photography, and archives. Her images aim to complicate the boundaries between dead versus alive, nature versus artifice, and beauty versus the grotesque. She is currently working with Natural History collections to examine how we describe nature to ourselves over vast timescales.
Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard College and is currently an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico. She was awarded the 2022 Film Photo Student Project Award, and she currently holds a fellowship at the Center for Regional Studies at UNM. She was a 2023-2024 Emerging Artist Fellow at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, where she had a solo show in May 2024.
Ressel’s first photobook, Olives in the street, was published in 2017. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives in Albuquerque, NM, where in addition to working toward her MFA, she teaches photography at UNM.
Alumni
