This year, 1 in 4 UCLA Arts students received a full or partial scholarship. Our students have presented new work to the public across 28 student exhibitions and performances. More than 20 visiting lectures and career day events have put students in the room with leaders in their fields—helping them build networks, find mentorship, and advance their careers.
These opportunities don’t happen in a vacuum. Each one is the result of a choice made by someone who understood that the arts are not a luxury but a necessity, and that the conditions for serious creative work have to be built and sustained by a community that believes in it.
The artists, architects, designers, and scholars at UCLA Arts are already making things that didn’t exist before, asking difficult questions, and showing up for their communities. The support they receive shapes what becomes possible.
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How can arts education change lives?
UCLA Arts’ Visual and Performing Arts Education program prepares the next generation of artist-educators who use creative practice, teaching, and community engagement to transform learning environments and expand access to the arts.
Faculty and students work across teaching artistry, curriculum design, performance, visual arts, and community-based practice. Their work is rooted in equity, committed to access, and oriented toward meaningful, lasting impact. The work they do reaches into public schools and communities across Los Angeles and beyond, shaping a more inclusive and imaginative future for cultural learning.
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What happens when artists and scientists work together?
The UCLA Art|Sci Center fosters innovative collaborations between artistic practice and scientific research, generating new forms of knowledge and creative expression. Housed within the Department of Design Media Arts and the California NanoSystems Institute, the Center serves as a dynamic hub where two different ways of seeing and thinking meet on equal ground.
Through residencies, collaborative research, public programs, and student engagement opportunities, artists and scientists explore shared questions about the natural world, technology, and what it means to be human. The work that emerges from these partnerships often anticipates where both fields are heading, revealing possibilities that neither could discover alone.
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Who builds the cities of tomorrow?
CityLAB UCLA is a design and research think tank within the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. The lab brings together faculty, students, researchers, and external partners to investigate the systems that shape city life, from housing and infrastructure to climate resilience and public space. Through design, research, policy, publications, and exhibitions, CityLAB translates critical ideas into actionable proposals for real-world impact.
At its core, CityLAB is committed to reimagining how cities are designed and governed, positioning architecture as a tool for civic engagement and social transformation. The solutions developed here move beyond the studio and into the world, reaching policymakers, communities, and the public.
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Can technology expand creative practice?
At the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, that question drives everything. Working across graphic design and branding, video, animation, game design, and digital fabrication, faculty and students develop new forms of artistic expression, cultivating practices in which next-generation tools drive discovery and experimentation.
Their work spans galleries, labs, stages, publications, and digital platforms, often anticipating cultural shifts and technological breakthroughs before they reach the mainstream. As creative technologies continue to evolve, so too does DMA, continually pushing the boundaries of expression and reshaping how we engage with the world.
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Can movement and cultural expression drive social change?
At the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, artists and scholars use performance and cultural inquiry to make transformative work that drives change. They work across choreography, filmmaking, ethnography, curatorial practice, performance, and activism, always rooted in community, committed to justice, and oriented toward transformation.
The department emerged from the merger of a groundbreaking dance program, the first of its kind at a public university in the United States, and a globally engaged cultural studies unit. That legacy shapes everything. From Los Angeles neighborhoods to international stages, the work that happens here reaches beyond the studio and into the world, asking hard questions about culture, power, and what it means to live together.
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What can games become?
UCLA Game Lab is an experimental space dedicated to redefining what games can be and do. Situated at the intersection of art, design, technology, and critical theory, the Game Lab supports the creation of innovative, concept-driven games that expand the boundaries of interactive media.
Students, faculty, and visiting artists come together to develop games as tools for storytelling, research, performance, and cultural critique. The work spans experimental gameplay, installation, performance, and digital art, reflecting a commitment to pushing the form in both conceptual and technical directions. These are not games as entertainment. They are games as a rigorous and expressive medium capable of engaging complex social, political, and philosophical ideas.
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Who builds the future?
For 60 years, the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design has championed bold ideas and visionary thinking. Architecture is an expansive discipline: a catalyst for shaping cities, responding to the natural world, and redefining how we live together.
Our faculty bring students together with practitioners and communities to tackle the defining challenges of our time, from climate adaptation and urban resilience to affordable housing and disaster recovery. The work they do is approached with creativity, critical insight, and optimism. The solutions they explore move beyond the studio and into the world, asking hard questions about how we want to live in it.
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How can art address the world’s most urgent health challenges?
The UCLA Art & Global Health Center brings together artists, designers, health practitioners, researchers, and communities to explore what happens when creative practice meets pressing global health issues. The Center supports innovative collaborations that use artistic expression as a tool for dialogue, healing, and systems change, engaging challenges from public health communication and mental health to equity in healthcare access and community wellbeing.
Through performances, participatory projects, research initiatives, and cross-sector partnerships, the Center elevates the arts not as decoration or afterthought, but as essential to how we understand care, empathy, and collective responsibility. The work bridges artistic expression and health sciences, asking what becomes possible when those two fields genuinely listen to each other.
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Can art reimagine the world?
At UCLA, we believe it can and that it does. The UCLA Department of Art has been at the forefront of arts education since 1939, cultivating generations of artists who don’t just participate in the cultural landscape but actively shape it. Led by a faculty of renowned working artists, the department fosters bold, interdisciplinary work that engages the complexities of contemporary life. Students emerge with not only technical mastery but the personal vision and critical insight to push the boundaries of what art can be and do in the world.
The Department of Art helped establish Los Angeles as a global center for contemporary art. That legacy is renewed every year by the students and faculty who choose to do their most serious work here.
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When a person finds the right environment to make rigorous creative work, the investigations become more complex, more nuanced, and more deeply human. The work begins to matter in ways that extend beyond the studio, the stage, the screen.
At UCLA Arts, we see it every day. Architects respond to the defining challenges of our time, designers develop new forms of artistic expression across media and technology, dancers and choreographers leverage embodied practice and critical scholarship to drive transformative work, and artists expand what art can be and do in the world.
The work of this community is built and amplified by the people who believe in it.
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