Computer Art and Animation B.F.A.

About this Program

• Learn 3D computer animation, electronic object creation, code-based art, sound design and sonic art.
• Receive mentoring to become a highly skilled critical thinker producing art in individual and collaborative contexts.
• Build a strong foundation for working within the digital realm in your first year while developing an artistic voice engaged in the language of the medium.
• Investigate the diverse possibilities of computer art in your second year, the intensity of which is oriented by your interest and tailored through mentorship.
• Bring the skills you’ve developed into creative focus in your third and fourth years, demonstrating a professional art practice that is both technically sophisticated and critically engaged.
• Participate in the VPA LA Semester, an immersive professional development program that provides students with a unique opportunity to work as interns in Los Angeles while taking academic courses taught by LA professionals with expertise in their given discipline.

Computer Art and Animation (B.F.A.)

Department of Film and Media Arts

The bachelor of fine arts (B.F.A.) degree program in computer art and animation is dedicated to exploring the possibilities of digital media within a fine art, exploratory, and culturally aware setting. The program provides instruction in multiple art media where the computer plays the primary role.

Computer art and animation majors may participate in the VPA LA Semester, an immersive professional development program that provides students with a unique opportunity to work as interns in Los Angeles while taking academic courses taught by LA professionals with expertise in their given discipline.

Within the department, computer art and animation is integrated with film, art video, and art photography, allowing for a practice that is tightly focused but free to traverse a network of related disciplines. This network expands into the rest of Syracuse University, challenging you to further develop the intellectual resources needed to inform your work. Through this process you synthesize a perspective that is shaped within a web of mutual influence and discourse.

The computer art and animation program boasts alumni who are placed at some of the most prestigious animation and visual effects companies in the world—Pixar, Cartoon Network, Filmworks/FX, LucasArts, Tippett Studio, and Sony Pictures Imageworks—along with creative representation at galleries and media art festivals internationally. The program’s alumni and faculty have consistently pushed the edge publicly as to what it means to be a computer artist and continue to maintain that intensity today.

Recently our program was ranked among the top 40 animation programs in the country among private schools by Animation Career Review.