Be part of a uniquely innovative community within an art, design, and architecture school centered in Brooklyn as you explore the ever-changing landscape of contemporary media and how it interacts with culture and society. Blend critical theory with creative skills to reflect on the media’s effects on economy, race, gender, and politics.
A Graduate Program in Media Studies Designed for Aspiring Media Scholars and Professionals
Combining critical theory and creative practices, your graduate education in media studies will enable you to understand how media influence the way we perceive and interpret the world. In Media Studies, 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. Our small classes allow students to work closely with faculty who are experts in areas such as digital media, global communication culture, film, performance, music, and sound. Through guest lectures, internships and collaborative projects, students engage with scholars and industry professionals who lead them to the forefront of media research and innovation.
Student Work
Take a look at recent examples of work by our students in our media studies courses.
The Experience
Join our vibrant community of thinkers and creators at the Brooklyn campus, and prepare to make your mark in the ever-evolving media landscape.
Apply today and discover the transformative power of media in our interconnected world.
Internships & Electives
The program offers a range of internships and electives within media studies. You can develop particular areas of concentration through coursework, mentored studies and in one-to-one work with thesis advisers. In elective seminars, you’ll join 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.
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
- promote 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
Our faculty are leading academics and media practitioners with a wealth of expertise in areas such as digital media, cinema studies, critical race studies, experimental media art and performance studies. With a focus on transdisciplinarity and practice-based research, they bring diverse views, methods and professional expertise to their classrooms.
Jonathan Beller
Professor, Graduate Program
Professor, Graduate Program
Minh-Ha Pham
Professor, Graduate Program
Professor, Graduate Program
Ethan Spigland
Professor, Graduate Program
Professor, Graduate Program
Faith Holland
Assistant Professor, Graduate Program
Assistant Professor, Graduate Program
Shayla Lawz
Assistant Professor, Media Studies
Assistant Professor, Media Studies
Dalia Davoudi
Assistant Professor, Media Studies
Assistant Professor, Media Studies
Karin Shankar
Assistant Professor, Performance and Performance Studies
Assistant Professor, Performance and Performance Studies
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.
Ready for More?
| HERE’S HOW TO APPLY | OUR CAMPUS & BEYOND |
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| Learn more about admissions requirements, plan your visit, talk to a counselor, and start your application. Take the next step. | You’ll find yourself at home at Pratt. Learn more about our residence halls, student organizations, athletics, gallery exhibitions, events, the amazing City of New York and our Brooklyn neighborhood communities. Check us out. |
ITAL 201-1: Intermediate Italian
Prof. Barbara Turoff, Spring 2025
Wednesday, 2:00-3:20/Thursday, 9:30-10:50
Do you already know some Italian and want to improve your fluency? Have you already completed the Rome program or are planning to go? Why not continue improving your Italian?
Intermediate Italian I is open to students who have taken Italian 101 and 102 or who already have a knowledge of Italian.
1 month ago
Julia Comita (MA in Media Studies graduate student) has released a photo series and accompanying essay in The Advocate (November 29, 2024).
Prim ‘n Poppin’ is an ongoing photographic series highlighting inclusivity in beauty advertising through a vintage lens. The project features 9 all-original “ads” based on existing beauty advertisements from the 1970s, but flipping the often discriminatory imagery and languaging on its head to address current issues such as transgender rights and body positivity. Prim ‘n Poppin’ can be viewed in full, along with interviews provided by all cast members, on the website www.prim-poppin.com.
You can read the essay here: https://www.advocate.com/voices/beauty-ads
1 month ago
HMS-342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema
Mon 7:00p-9:50pm
Professor Ethan Spigland
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.
2 months ago
HMS 390A/600S-02: Poetry Across Media
Sacha Frey
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50pm (Online)
3 Credits
What is a poem? Who is a poet? What are the limits of the poem?
In this course we will look and listen for poems and the poetic across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, internet and video) and works typically presented as representative of other art forms (such as sculpture, painting, music, video art, conceptual art, net art, and dance). We will discuss these works in the context of poetry criticism and media theory.
2 months ago
HMS 405A:The Harlem Renaissance
Wed 5:00pm - 7:50pm
Professor Dexter Jeffries
What is the public responsibility of the American artist? How can artists, poets, and novelists envision the proper role which identity plays in determining the bounds of creative expression? By studying The Harlem Renaissance during the transformative epoch of 1890 to 1940, this course will unpack these very questions by focusing on the racial, cultural, and political forces which defined an unparalleled, contentious period in African American Literature.
We will begin by reading foundational thinkers like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson, who paved the way for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, as competing artistic conceptions of racial identity played out across nearly half a century. New York City itself emerges as a main stage for this unfolding drama, as Harlem became a hub of African American cultural foment in the Roaring ‘20s, home to voices as diverse as the prolific N.A.A.C.P leader W.E.B Dubois and the Jamaican-born, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Back To Africa Movement, thinkers who publicly dueled over the present and future of Black America.
These debates will be reassessed through Modernist literature, film, jazz, and poetics, as manifestos such as T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) parallel Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) — treatises that demand the artist face the role of personal identity and its manifold influence on creativity.
2 months ago
HMS-440S-02: Gender and Sexualities in Latin American Cinema
Th 2:00pm-4:50 pm
Professor Mónica-Ramón Ríos
An in-depth look at the history, regions, and social contexts of Latin American cinema via key women directors and screenwriters and the analysis of female, femme, and masc representations.
The course includes materials that can be accessed in Spanish or English, and thus gives students with advanced or mid-level knowledge of Spanish the opportunity to engage with texts and conversations in Spanish. No prior knowledge of Spanish is required.
2 months ago
HMS 492A/592A: Animation Narrative: Historical and Theoretical Contexts
Ellery Washington
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50
3 credits
This course focuses on the fundamentals of narrative theory and practice, with an emphasis on how to employ strong narrative elements in visual work, especially animation and film, and on translating theory into practice. As a starting point, the course examines traditional stories and their underlying structures, looking closely at ancient mythologies from various world cultures and the common narrative elements they share, while comparing visual representations that correspond to these elements.
The course advances to less traditional narrative structures (i.e. nonlinear, antiheroic, sensory, etc.), the more complex and often abstract visual representations these structures have evoked, and the narrative theories that engage them.
2 months ago
HMS360A/PPS 661S: The New Circus
Jennifer Miller
Tuesday 02:00-04:50pm
3 Credits
In The New Circus we will combine practical circus skills with a study of the historical and theoretical issues involved in the evolving new queer circus movement. Practical skills include, juggling, slack rope walking, object balancing, object puppetry and basic partner acrobatics, and clowning. We will explore performance styles ranging from Judson influenced improvisation and pedestrian movement to clown shtick and the grand circus Ta-Da.
We will look at queer performance theory, traditional circus history, history of the sideshow, pageantry, political theater, writings on freaks and otherness, contemporary performance art, and clowning. We will touch on several aspects of show creation as we prepare for an end of semester show.
Students will be expected to work on all of the skills offered in the class and to master at least one. Wholehearted participation in both studio work and discussion is expected. All students will participate in creating a grand final performance.
2 months ago
HMS 491A/591A: Contemporary Artist’s Book in Historical and Theoretical Contexts
Youmna Chlala
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50pm
3 Credits
This course develops critical frameworks for interpreting and creating artists’ books; that is, artworks in which the book is a medium. We will study such books alongside histories of the field, theoretical writings, and critical commentaries.
These studies will inform our endeavors to create, catalog, and/or critique artists? books in which visual, verbal, and material elements are interwoven.
Advanced students from various fields are encouraged to use and expand their own disciplinary perspectives. Visits to collections around New York City will supplement Pratt’s resources.
2 months ago
