CCA launches new Bachelor in Fine Arts in Comics in fall 2022
Artwork by Meggie Ramm (CCA MFA Comics 2017)
San Francisco, CA—September 8, 2021—Beginning in fall 2022, California College of the Arts (CCA) will begin offering its new Bachelor of Fine Arts in Comics.
As the only undergraduate program like it on the West Coast, CCA’s BFA in Comics uniquely prepares students to enter the professional comics industry with a singular artistic practice and critical capacity, having spent four years making comics that engage with the ethical, historical, and social dimensions of the greater world beyond the college.
The BFA in Comics’ practice-based curriculum is designed to help students hone their personal storytelling voice while exploring all aspects of cartooning—digital and analog tools, drawing and illustration, personal narrative and genre storytelling, graphic and publication design, comics history and theory, and professional and portfolio development. Students will gain extensive technical experience with digital, analog, and multigenre storytelling and develop a digital skill set grounded in industry-standard software suites.
After completing CCA’s BFA in Comics program, graduates will have attained both broad and specialized technical and conceptual competencies to employ in their postgraduate careers. Throughout the program, students will gain experience creating professional quality comics in a variety of genres and for different audiences.
“California College of the Arts has such a rich history of supporting visual storytelling across its curriculum,” says Eisner Award–nominated writer and artist Matt Silady, chair of the new BFA Comics program. “Now, with an entire undergraduate program dedicated to studying and making comics, there’s never been a better time to be a cartoonist at CCA. We have an incredibly talented comics faculty ready to work side-by-side with our undergraduate comics majors as they bring their stories to life on the page.”
A student hangs artwork for CCA's annual Emanata Comics Gallery exhibition.
CCA is home to a well-established, low-residency graduate program in comics, and CCA Comics faculty are immersed in San Francisco’s historic, vibrant comics scene. Among the faculty are leaders of publishing imprints dedicated to cartoonists of color and queer storytellers as well as members of the influential storytelling collective The BAYlies. In addition to BFA Comics Chair Matt Silady (The Homeless Channel), CCA Comics faculty include Thi Bui (The Best We Could Do), Justin Hall (No Straight Lines), and Ed Luce (Wuvable Oaf). MFA Comics alumni have contributed important works to the collective dialogue, including Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir and Alex Combs’ upcoming Trans History: A Graphic Novel.
For additional information and to apply for the BFA in Comics program at CCA, visit cca.edu/humanities-sciences/bfa-comics.