This studio elective - open to all RISD graduate students regardless of departmental affiliation-will address rotating topics and modes of making, thinking and discourse every semester. The structure and content of this course is designed to shift, enabling different topical investigations and a variety of expert faculty teaching special content in fall and spring of each year. This enables the flexibility for studio consideration of an ever-changing range of both topics and studio engagement. This course may be repeated for elective credit with permission of a student's graduate program director (GPD).

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

WINTERSESSION 2026: Performance, Participation, Installation, and Transmedia Storytelling

Performance art includes various forms and histories, often taking a multidisciplinary approach. This course teaches students to turn ideas into performative acts and multi-sensory art installations. Students will explore narrative in performance and the ethics of participatory art while creating their own interactive works. Core principles emphasized include autonomy, non-maleficence, justice, and truth-telling. This course also examines the artist’s role in shaping audience experience in museums and galleries, focusing on participatory engagement and community-centered practices.

This studio elective - open to all RISD graduate students regardless of departmental affiliation-will address rotating topics and modes of making, thinking and discourse every semester. The structure and content of this course is designed to shift, enabling different topical investigations and a variety of expert faculty teaching special content in fall and spring of each year. This enables the flexibility for studio consideration of an ever-changing range of both topics and studio engagement. This course may be repeated for elective credit with permission of a student's graduate program director (GPD).

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This course delves into visual culture through first-hand encounters with illustrated exemplars held in the Special Collections at RISD Fleet Library, the Hay and the John Carter Brown Libraries at Brown University, and the Providence Athenaeum. Secondary research into the causes and conditions of their publication will help to illuminate the role of printed images in influencing opinion, and ultimately the shaping of societies. Seminar discussions will center on the nature of publishing in historic and contemporary contexts and consider the diverse ways that visual rhetoric circulates in culture, and is further mediated in institutional and cultural settings. Expository writing practice is key to this research seminar. Facilitated through our object-based study and under the guidance of faculty and Special Collections research librarians, students will develop several short essays and a final project in the form of a research document or format suitable for display. A final work summary will be part of a self-assessment prepared by the student. This class is required for students in the Illustration MFA program and open to all Graduates Students.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

A defining aspect of human consciousness is creation of meaning through the construction of narrative- a particularly potent mode of communication because it conveys information in a way that allows us to empathetically imagine the lives of others. Beyond the limitations of facts, polemic or data narrative entrances, narrative entertains and enriches us. As such, it is a basic element of Illustration. This class seeks to examine why and how stories matter in the context of traditional and contemporary world culture. We will explore how story construction, narrative voice, imagery, and choice of media intersect to create meaning and reach various audiences. We will look a broad scope of narrative strategies (linear, symbolic, interactive, etc.) from the revelations of the handmade artist's book to cutting-edge technology that is shaping narrative and its reception.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course will deal with critical understandings of visual culture, narrative, and the melding of written and visual languages in contemporary graphic texts. We will begin with a study of visual culture, and some of the key issues, ideas, and questions that underlie thinking about visuality: its spaces and places; the politics of representation; theories of the spectator/audience; modes of reproduction and circulation of texts in the era of digitization and globalization. We will then consider theories of narratology, as they are particularly useful to a study of the graphic medium. For the final weeks of the semester, we will move to a consideration of some of the rich and varied criticism from within the field.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $260.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In his 1909 An Essay in Aesthetics, Roger Fry talks about the moral purpose of art-to offer viewers the opportunity to experience emotion with objectivity. Rather than actually witnessing a terrible accident in a train station, in a film we are able to experience the event and its associated emotions without the urgency of response required if it were truly happening before us. We are able to feel and to observe ourselves feeling. While Fry was focusing on the experience of visual art, his description of purpose is precisely applicable to the writing of narrative fiction. The ultimate goal of storytelling is to share an experience or another world with a reader, and the focal point of that experience is the conjuring of emotion. This course will focus on the development of understanding and facility in the creation of emotion in fiction. We will address the basic structures of plot and conflict and move directly to the creation of work that will be presented in workshop. The discussion will focus on the writer's intent: their goals for the emotional and narrative experience for the reader.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course is predicated on deep student focus on social engagement and the societal benefits attached to their studio work. Students will investigate and critique methodologies of contemporary, socially engaged artists to develop their own progressive work in order to question and shift traditionally narrow and restrictive paradigms in Illustration that preference and reward the hegemonic at the expense of the progressive, dissident, and critical work needed to advocate for the historically underrepresented. Collaborative projects with local artists, individuals and community organizations will be encouraged and supported to directly connect students with local communities. Students will be required to present self-driven work periodically in response to selected topics, readings, and community discussion.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course emphasizes the mining and contextualization of one's own work as a nexus for growth through the active, ongoing and evolving consideration of your own studio practice as a topic of study in itself. This work will spring from and shed light on your creative intuition, processes and outcomes in a way that will helps you to communicate your work to others through language. In turn, it is hoped this voicing of essential components of your work will help streamline your practice and expedite your artistic production.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

As a culmination of the MFA program, this intensive studio challenges students to design and craft a significant, topically-focused body of work. Although students may choose creative formats and media according to their own interests, they must publish thesis work produced in class. Publication through digital platforms (podcasts, websites, apps, etc.) will be coordinated with analog forms when possible and appropriate to the project. Together with the research and writing produced in ILLUS 606G Paradigms and Contexts: Publishing the Thesis and Beyond, a comprehensive body of work and a written thesis document will be produced.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $1,500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar supports the work of the Thesis Studio IV by providing a formal class setting in which to create written reflections on one's evolving studio thesis work as well as-more broadly-writings on illustration practice. Sessions will center on discussion of assigned readings as well as written responses to classmates' essays. These exercises will scaffold a more expansive documentation of their Studio Thesis Project, and to serve as a forum for discussion of critical writing about contemporary illustration practice that will support an essay to be contributed to the groups final publication.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

What if buildings could breathe, furniture could grow, and materials could heal themselves? What if the future of design wasn’t plastic or concrete—but alive? This hands-on, immersive course explores the fascinating world of bio-materials, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in sustainable design.

Students will delve into natural materials like bamboo, mycelium-based products, algae-based substances, and hempcrete—materials that not only reduce ecological footprints but also offer innovative structural and aesthetic potential. Through field visits, lab experiments, real-time material testing, and design challenges, they will explore how these materials evolve, decay, and adapt in response to different conditions.

A key component of this course is hands-on experimentation. Students will cultivate mycelium, mix and pour hempcrete, and bend bamboo to its limits. They will analyze the origins, properties, and life cycle impacts of these materials, gaining a deeper understanding of their role in environmental sustainability and innovation.

By the end of this course, students will have developed foundational knowledge of bio-materials and their applications, equipping them with the skills to rethink materiality in design. Whether creating artworks, products, or structures, students will be encouraged to use imagination to break boundaries and design for a future where nature and innovation collide.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

The course focuses on understanding the origin of museums and recognizing the influence that certain dominant design aesthetics, approaches, and narratives had on exhibitions. The museum architectural space and its interior exhibition design are never 'neutral' and the study of its history, codification, and exploitation are essential to rebalance and subvert the structural inequalities between Trouillot's agents (museums/institution), actors (curators/exhibit designers), and subject of museum narratives (artifacts/art/belongings). Through lectures, readings, and class debate, students will be encouraged to question how aesthetics impregnate exhibition environments through materials, light, colors, forms, and meanings; to acknowledge that architecture and exhibition design aesthetics are always politicized and that in the tiniest details of their morphology and their organization, museums have the power to validate, the power to corroborate, the power to include, and the deliberate power to silence. 

Major Elective: MDes ENE

Topics in Exhibition and Narrative Environments I is the first part in a year-long exploration of a fluid field in which exhibition occurs in museums as well as other environments. This seminar offers various approaches for that exploration and will provide the student insight into different aspects of exhibition: curatorial matters, experience design, narrative creation, graphic design, new media, user participation, installation, site specificity, production, etc. The content may change from year to year to include special projects. The content may change from year to year and may include theory, hands-on installation, curatorial matters, research, design planning, materials, new technology, time based interactions, and, of course, design of the narrative environment.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Exhibition and Narrative Environments

Topics in Exhibition and Narrative Environments II follows upon INTAR-2102 and continues the exploration of the principles of exhibition from curatorial matters, experience design, narrative creation, graphic design, new media, user participation, installation, site specificity, production, etc. Topics II will conclude with the selection of a potential Thesis subject.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Exhibition and Narrative Environments

This course focuses on the hands-on process of designing and constructing exhibitions. Students will explore the key elements of exhibition design, including spatial planning, material selection, lighting, signage and way-finding. They will also be exposed to standard fabrication and printing techniques commonly used within the industry.

Working collaboratively, students will design and build exhibits, moving from concept development to the physical installation. Emphasis is placed on real-world problem-solving, project management, and understanding the technical aspects of exhibition construction.

The course will culminate in fully realized exhibits giving the students opportunities to engage the public and share their work. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00

Elective

This studio is both a research-based and design-focused course that explores the emergent futures of hybrid art spaces and cultural consumption practices, with a particular emphasis on their application within contemporary art museums.

As part of a collaborative research initiative between RISD and Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, the course brings together students, faculty, and museum professionals to investigate how changing cultural behaviors and global trends are reshaping the way we understand and engage with art spaces, both from a physical and digital perspective.

The course is open to students from all departments within the Division of Architecture and Design and approached through a multidisciplinary lens, recognizing that the experience of an art space is shaped by multiple intersecting layers—from architecture and exhibition design (space), to user experience (experience), to graphic design (information).

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $100.00

Elective

Interior Architecture and the work of adaptive reuse pose a challenge: To understand an existing idea, concept, materiality, and context, which then becomes the starting point for architectural transformation. The origin may be ill-used or obsolete; the challenge is to knit together that which exists, with newly created form and materiality. Through a series of intertwined projects students will use multiple hand hewn modalities to draw and model proposals. This introductory studio is not designed for students with prior architectural training.

Elective

This course, the first in a sequence, explores design principles through design problems involving the unique fundamental framework for the reuse of existing structures. The semester is arranged around several projects, providing access to the discipline from as many related perspectives. The project assignments require the student to visually and verbally convey clear design intent, think visually in two and three dimensions, formulate and develop abstract design concepts, discern relationships between design interventions and their physical and contextual setting and develop presentation skills to effectively communicate propositions and positions.

Major Requirement | BFA Interior Studies

This course further develops design principles from the first semester and introduces students to methodological thinking in the relationship between context, scale and use. Real site situations are introduced and students develop individual design processes associating topological relationships between the interior and exterior, at multiple scales of interventions. Students will have the opportunity to explore design issues through both traditional and computer generated design.

Major Requirement | BFA Interior Studies

This lecture course is designed to familiarize students with structural principles and systems as they relate to the study of interior architecture and adaptive reuse. The course will examine the performance and composition of various structural systems, including wood, lightweight metal, steel, masonry, and concrete structures. Local examples in the built environment will be explored to gain an understanding of structures, their materials and components in adaptive reuse. Course work will be complimented by visits to local examples in the built environment.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Adaptive Reuse