Connect to a uniquely vibrant community within an art, design, and architecture school centered in Brooklyn as you explore the ways media shape our views on culture, society, and politics. Blend critical theory with practical skills to examine media’s effects on power dynamics, inequality, and diversity locally and globally.
Media Studies at Pratt
Combining critical theory and creative practices, your education in media studies will enable you to understand how media influence the way we perceive and interpret the world. We approach media not only as technologies of creating and sharing information but as productive spaces within which power, identity and differences are articulated, negotiated, and challenged. In our Graduate Program in Media Studies, you’ll develop analytical and practical skills in and outside of the studio environment to address media’s impact on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social change. Our small classes allow you to work closely with diverse faculty who are experts in areas such as digital media, global communication culture, film, performance, music, and sound.
Student Work
Take a look at recent examples of work by our students in our media studies courses.
The Experience
If you are interested in both media theory and critical practice, and want to pursue a graduate media studies program in an art environment, Media Studies at Pratt is the right place. Offered at the Brooklyn campus, our program is connected to a larger community of critics, artists and designers on and beyond our campus who engage in and create the very media we study.
Internships & Electives
The program offers a range of internships and electives within media studies. You can develop particular areas of concentration, first through coursework and then in one-to-one work with thesis advisers. In elective seminars, you’ll join small discussions focused on individual or team presentations on the analysis of texts, films, objects, themes, and theories, engaging the interface between the theorization and production of media objects.
Professional Outcomes
With an MA in Media Studies from Pratt, graduates are able to:
- work as media professionals
- work across media platforms dedicated to promoting the arts, humanities, education, culture, and social justice
- work as writers, curators, administrators, critics, or social media professionals
- situate their creative practice within the contemporary media environment
- pursue a PhD in cinema, media, cultural studies, race and gender studies, queer studies, and more
Our Faculty
The creative professionals and scholars in Pratt’s Media Studies faculty share a common desire to develop each student’s potential and creativity to the fullest. Bringing different views, methods, and perspectives from their industries, they infuse cultural and professional expertise into the program which cultivates a rigorous educational model for our students.
Our core MA in Media Studies faculty include:
Take graduate electives with our Performance/Performance Studies faculty:
Our Alumni
Pratt’s distinguished alumni are leading diverse and thriving careers, addressing critical challenges, and creating innovative work that reimagines our world.
Where They Work
- Eric Trenkamp, GPMS ’20, author of Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America: Dust That Never Settles—book based on MA thesis project.
- Keisha Nicole Knight, GPMS ’18 created Sentient.Art.Film, a creative distribution initiative for distributing experimental films.
- Lauren La Melle, GPMS ’18 Office Manager at Aubin Pictures and creator of ScaryCrit — a podcast about horror films and Blackness.
- Alexa McDougall, GPMS ’20 Project Manager at NBCUniversal Media.
- Paige Polk, GPMS ’19 joined the Advancement Project National Office team in DC as Sr. Digital Campaigns Innovator, where she builds interactive digital projects related to their community organizing campaigns.
Success Stories
Ready for More?
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HMS 452P/652P: Writing for Interior Design
Pierre De Looz
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:50pm
3 Credits
Writing for Interior Design ranges from the conceptual and creative (incorporating writing into the design process itself) to the practical (the kinds of writing involved with communicating in the professional arena). This course activates core language and research skills from the Humanities in order to help advanced design students recognize and understand design literature, to use writing as a process tool, and ultimately to write about their own theoretical and real-world design work.
14 hours ago
HMS 451/651: Art and Politics of Public Writing
Minh-Ha Pham
Tuesday 09:30 - 12:20pm
3 Credits
Are you an avid reader of art and cultural criticism, whether in newspapers, magazines, blogs., or elsewhere? Do you have a perspective about art, culture, and society that you want to share with the public? Are you interested in sharpening this perspective through research and revision?
This course will teach students how to write about the arts and culture for a general audience. We will read and write essays that go beyond personal opinion and shallow moralizing. Students will learn how to draw on research and revision to produce strong, persuasive, and clear points of view about the arts and/or cultural product, practice, or phenomenon.
We will read essays on a wide range of topics (e.g., food, TV, fine art, social injustice, and more); discuss the contents and craft of a compelling piece of art and cultural criticism; as well as practice writing, revising, and pitching these articles to editors.
16 hours ago
HMS 441A/541A: Global Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 5:00 - 7:50pm
3 Credits
A film studies research course which aims to further understand the relationship of theory to practice through the work of contemporary independent international films. The theme of the family in selected films across cultures, such as “The Headless Woman” by Lucretia Martel (Argentina), “Dogtooth” by Yorogos Lathimos, (Greece),
•’A Separation”” by Ashgar Fahardi, (Iran), “The Apple” by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), “The Wonder” by Sebastian Lelio (Chile), “Parasite” by Bong Joon Ho (South Korea), and other excerpts from international auteurs, will allow us to investigate the signature styles of pioneering contemporary filmmakers.
Close readings will focus on their innovative use of engagement, displacement, disruption, and spectatorship in poetic storytelling, to call into question relationships between experience, cinematic storytelling, and the social order. Various modes of inquiry, including seminar style class discussion, brief, focused written responses, presentations, and video studies, will culminate in a final creative project.”
19 hours ago
HMS 440K/640S: Intensive Film Theory
Ali Sengul
Thursday 5:00-7:50pm
3 Credits
With an emphasis on the socially, politically and aesthetically situated character of film theory and theorizing, this course offers a critical survey of the history of film theory beginning with the early realism-modernism debate to medium-specificity and to the contemporary debates on digital (non)indexicality and algorithmic images Through seminal primary texts, manifestos, movements and turning points, the students will also study the intersection of film theorizing and social theory through psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, feminism, queer studies, political economy and critical race theory.
With weekly film screenings, we will discuss a) the role and importance of film theory and theorizing in our current social-political moment and b) how this current moment would inform the way we can revisit the history of film and film theory.
2 days ago
HMS 440F/540F: Women in International Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 9:30am - 12:20pm
3 Credits
What is body? What is gender? What is a woman? How does this impact representation? How have the historic women filmmakers across cultures inform contemporary filmmaking by women? What do these works suggest about new paradigms for women, representation and filmmaking? How can we consider these impulses in our own work?
These are some of the questions our viewing of a pioneering filmmakers from Kinyuo Tanaka (Japan), Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysia) Tatania Huezo (Mexico), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Ghana) to Barbara Loden (USA), Shirin Night (Iran), Celine Sciamma (France), Rebecca Hall (UK) and others will focus on. We will pay particular attention to gaze, agency, the abject, and intersectionality as cinematic vocabulary and subject. Close readings of films brief focused writing, research and presentations, and video studies assignments will allow us to respond with our own textual and visual works.
2 days ago
HMS 440E/540E: Poetics of Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits
All art and design mediums use poetics. In search of new ways of enlivening our own creative practices, we will mine the immersive language of cinema - image, gesture, time, space, and sound to expand our understanding of the relationship of spectator, narrative, character and composition. Shifting between close reading of short and long form poetic narrative films by innovative pioneers from Terrence Malick to Rungano Nyoni, Julian Schnabel to Alice Rohwacher, and cinematic and textual experiments of our own, will ground our understanding of these concepts as resources relevant to our own practices. No prior film/poetics experience necessary.
2 days ago
HMS 407P/630S: Queer Archives
Dalia Davoudi
Thursday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits
“Queer Archives” offers a set of methods and forms for engaging with the material remains of lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, and nonbinary histories.
In doing so, we look at repositories for these materials, including both physical archives in New York City such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the Schlesinger Library, as well as virtual and digitized archives such as NYC Trans Oral History Project.
Besides developing archival skills and learning how to liaise with museums and archives to work with historical materials, this course considers the ways that these materials have been remediated and incorporated into a variety of forms and adaptations, highlighting film, literature, exhibits, and video essays.
Our theoretical grounding will be in queer and feminist media studies, queer-of-color performance studies, as well as affect theory and theories of temporality, play, and ritual. Assignments for this course include one analytical essay, a creative re-mediation assignment, and a BYO (Build-Your-Own) Archive assignment.
3 days ago
HMS-390A-01/ HMS-600S-02: Poetry Across Media
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:50pm
Room: Online
Sacha Frey
“Who is a poet? Are the answers the same for all people, in all times? ... Is the Baptist preacher who describes the Last Judgment or the Valley of the Dry Bones a poet? Is the blues singer / composer a poet? Is Melvin Tolson a greater poet than James Brown?” - Stephen Henderson
What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and notions of “the poetic” across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, Internet, & video) and works typically presented as representative of other artforms (ie: sculpture, painting, music, media art, and dance) that we will read as poetry.
Students will gain practice in the writing and reading of media theory and poetry criticism and the building of poemsin or into their creative practice.
3 days ago
HMS 342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema
Ethan Spigland
Monday 7:00 - 9:50pm
3 Credits
The French New Wave is one of the most fascinating and influential of all film movements, celebrated for its exuberance and experimental approach to aesthetics. This class offers a fresh look at the socio-economic and cultural context that shaped French cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. We will track the precursors to the French New Wave, then focus on the core group of critics-turned-directors from the journal Cahiers du Cinéma (François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette) who would become the leading lights of the movement. We will study the relation between aesthetics and politics in their work as well as the depiction of gender and the construction of sexual identities. We will also examine the subgroup of French filmmakers known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
3 days ago
