Spotlight | Brooklyn College: School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts

Welcome to Broadway Stages' Spotlight, where we feature local shops, restaurants, organizations, individuals, and venues. October is National Arts and Humanities Month, a collective recognition of the importance of culture in America. Join Broadway Stages in showing appreciation for the value that the arts and humanities add to our lives, communities, and economy during this observance! This week, we discuss Brooklyn College's School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts!

As one of the premier studio production companies in New York, Broadway Stages works to meet the growing needs of the film and TV industry while also focusing on the needs of our community. We provide the industry with a soundstage or location where they shoot their scenes. Still, they also need a skilled and experienced workforce.

The School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts at Brooklyn College is an incredible resource for those considering entering the film and TV industry. The school offers world-class training at an affordable price. Forbes magazine voted Brooklyn College "Best Bang for the Buck" and The Princeton Review "Best Value College."

It also has several unique and convenient locations. The School uses the City as a living classroom, offering well-equipped facilities, studios, smart classrooms, and production and practice rooms. Facilities include the Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts, the Clarence Tow Theater, the Don Buchwald Theater, the New Workshop Theater, the Topfer Rehearsal Studio, and state-of-the-art Digital and Multimedia Labs.

For more than 85 years, students have come to learn from the renowned faculty of academics, professionals, and artists, who are among the best in their fields. Legends such as painters Mark Rothko and Philip Pearlstein, composer Tania León, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and documentary filmmaker Sarah Christman have taught there, cultivating the creative minds of the next generation. You can find a complete list of the current faculty members by clicking here.

The School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts has several academic specialties.

●        The Film department offers film studies, film production, screenwriting, documentary, and industry studies concentrations. Costing one-third of other major film schools, the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema has been rated a Top U.S. Film School by Hollywood Reporter, MovieMaker, and Variety. It offers M.F.A. programs in sonic arts, media scoring, and cinema arts (with specializations in live-action filmmaking and digital animation and visual effects), as well as an M.A. program in screen studies.

●        The Theater department provides an affordable, accessible, outstanding education taught by a nationally recognized faculty of theater artists and leaders. Students in this program will develop and inspire each theater maker to embrace and express their unique artistic voice.

●        The Art department focuses on studio art and art history. Students are exposed to a wide variety of artistic studio practices and innovative art historical scholarship, training them for successful careers in these areas.

●        The esteemed Conservatory of Music of Brooklyn College offers undergraduate degrees in music, music composition, music education, and performance. Graduates can choose from specializations such as composition, media scoring, musicology, performance, and sonic arts. The college also offers advanced certificates in music education and performance and a post-master's advanced diploma in performance.

Training, theoretical and technical knowledge, and practical experience in conceptualizing and producing collaborative, multidisciplinary artworks are available through the Performance in Media Arts (PIMA) program. But students can also study theory and practice of state-of-the-art digital technologies in the Emerging Media Innovation Lab, which includes a multi-cam television streaming studio, a VR/Multimedia Lab, and a video newscast set as part of the Television, Radio, and Emerging Media program.

As students journey from academic to professional life, the Magner Career Center helps pave the road. Through job fairs, the internship database, and internship panels, students gain access to a wide variety of employers, including Atlantic Records, Brooklyn Museum, Comedy Central, HBO, Lincoln Center Theater, National Theatre (West End, London), NBCUniversal, Sony Entertainment, Viacom, WNYC, and many more.

If you are interested in Brooklyn College's degrees, click here for Undergraduate and Graduate programs. The School's Instagram and Facebook pages also have lots of information about engaging and unique student projects, exhibitions, and performances. Be sure to check them out!

To aid those considering careers in the film and TV industry, Broadway Stages has an ongoing blog series called Industry Jobs that looks at the various roles that make a production come to life. You can find the blog series by clicking here. We hope it provides insight and encourages you to consider a career in the film and TV industry, possibly by way of Brooklyn College's School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts!