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Studies

Studies

The Try Out course is flexible and gives you ample room to choose your own path. You will be working in an open and inquisitive environment alongside your teachers, artists and fellow students. You will learn by collaborating and experimenting together. The teachers guide you in finding your own creative process and nurturing your growth as an artist.

What will you learn in the Try Out course?

Over the four years of the Try Out course, you will learn how to utilise art and creativity to make a difference in society. You will learn how to overcome creative blocks, analyse films, work with different art forms and effectively get your message across to your audience. This course is all about developing your own voice as an artist, so you will work on projects that challenge you to go beyond the traditional art world. The programme is centred around you having enough space to discover and develop your personal artistic voice.

Study structure

  • In the first year, you will work on creating your own exposition or performance. This means that you will continuously be creating new artworks in your own workspace. Two teachers will guide you and help you discover which working methods work best for you. By experimenting and receiving feedback, you will learn what suits you. Additionally, you will choose two domains per semester that reflect your interests, such as scenario, portraits, movement (theatre), space, sound, drawing/sketching or audience. Your personal development and expression are front and centre.

  • In the second and third year, you will customise your own curriculum. You will take creativity-specific subjects in the form of the Creating Creativity and Liberal Arts minors. If you would like to dive deeper into a specific subject, you could also take other minors, both within ArtEZ and externally. If you have your own project that you would like to perform in the public domain, you may choose the “field project” option. There is no fixed order, so you take the reins and decide what you would like to do and when. You could also participate in summer school to broaden your knowledge.

  • In your final year of study, you will work on your graduation project. This will begin with a reinterpretation of your first year exhibition performance, but will now include all of the newfound knowledge and experiences you’ve gained. You will research how your art can make an impact on society and author a report or thesis. After that, you will work on your final exam project, which will be assessed on your creativity, impact and how well you convey your message.

Conducting research outside of your classes

If you study at ArtEZ, you will also be introduced to conducting research, which you will encounter in diverse theory lessons, material research and socially engaged research. You will have the department’s full support behind you and ample space to discover what sort of artistic researcher you are. Additionally, there are special initiatives, activities, workspaces and opportunities outside your department where you could also conduct or supplement your research. This resources are there especially for students who would like to deepen their research even further. Piqued your interest? Read more below about research activities at and outside ArtEZ.

Learn more about research at ArtEZ 

Surrounded by other study courses

You will study in the Sophia Building in a multidisciplinary environment with several other artistic courses in art & design and theatre. You will learn how to collaborate successfully on joint projects and how to complement and enrich each other. This is important preparation for professional practice, which increasingly involves cross-disciplinary cooperation.

Facilities

You will have all of the following resources at your disposal in the Sophia Building:

  • Digital workshop with photography, video, animation and editing rooms;
  • Graphic design workshop, mostly geared towards analogue printing techniques;
  • Spatial workshop with wood, metal, ceramic and plastic resources;
  • Library, where you can discover analogue and digital collections focused on theory;
  • Technology Lab with a streaming studio and 360-degree projector;
  • Soundlab; 
  • Theatre Hall

Tour the workshops by video

Support during your studies

Besides classroom lessons, you will have lots of one-to-one contact with your teachers during your course’s contact hours. This course requires a lot of initiative and self-reliance on your part.  You will learn how to design and manage creative projects yourself, not only artistically but on the business and project management side of things as well. Of course, if you have any questions, doubts or requests, you can always get in touch with your mentor. If you would like a strictly confidential conversation, you can always contact the ArtEZ student counsellor.

Studying in Zwolle

Zwolle is a dynamic city with winding streets, boutique shops and original restaurants. It is a place where creative students, innovative entrepreneurs and confident freethinkers can effortlessly find each other.

Discover more about Zwolle