16 Art MA Degree Programs in Netherlands

A unique program in terms of its diverse and interdisciplinary range of subjects, the Arts and Culture master's programme offers you the choice of two specializationsprogramprogram: Art History and Museum Studies. Each explores different themes from a comparative and global perspective and offers a broad range of electives, allowing you to further customize your degree.

The master's programme in Arts and Culture focuses on culture in the making. Culture can refer to the products of intellectual and artistic creativity, such as scholarly and literary texts or works of art. It also indicates the cultural practices that shape the everyday life of people, and is expressed in their individual tastes and forms of associating with one another.

This one-year Master of Animation is directed towards realizing your creative potential. You will learn to critically and creatively integrate innovatory studio work with theoretical principles. You explore storytelling in animation and compare this with your own artistic vision and style. You carry out research to discover which developments in the field of animation are relevant to your practice. You acquire experience in studio work and focus on planning, feasibility and production processes, with an emphasis on testing your own artistic freedom in relation to working on commission.

The MA in Arts and Culture: Art History is a unique curatorial program, with a combination of historical and theoretical depth. The faculty of our masters is specialized in the fields of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, including pre-modern globalization, the art of the Enlightenment, twentieth-century art, art criticism, new media, and materials and techniques.

Curatorial Studies in Art History is a one-year programme. We offer excellent students of the master's track in Art History an additional semester-long internship. Our programme aims to integrate early modern and modern and contemporary art, while also offering more period-specific courses. Our faculty includes the director of the Groninger Museum, Andreas Blühm, who teaches a course on the theory and practice of making exhibitions for all curatorial students. The following institutions regularly offer internships to our students: Museum Catharijneconvent en het Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Groninger Museum, the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen in Haarlem, the Stedelijke Musea Brugge, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Are you fascinated by the emotional and cognitive effects of films? Do you love studying documentaries and the contributions cinema can make to discussions of climate change? Then the Master’s track ‘Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media’ is the right one for you. Within a year you can acquire a Master’s degree from one of the Top 100 universities in the world—and you will do so in the city with the youngest population in the Netherlands. An internship in film, television or other media is part of the program as well. In ‘Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media’ you will work closely with our international faculty, who will initiate you into the latest theoretical debates in film and media studies. You will learn to work with state-of-the-art approaches such as phenomenology, film-cognitivism, ecocriticism, film philosophy, digital film forensics, and experimental media archaeology.

In the two-year Research Master's degree in Arts and Culture, you can choose between two tracks. The track in Literary and Cultural Studies offers you an advanced study of the arts. You will focus specifically on the role the arts play in processes of cultural change. Also, you will specialize in one of the involved art forms: literature, film, theatre, music or multimedia forms.

The two-year Master's track in Arts, Media and Literary Studies is a specialization within the Research Master's degree in Arts and Culture. Arts, Media and Literary Studies equips students with knowledge and skills to become researchers and experts on the role that the arts, literature and media play in society, now and in the past. The programme offers a rich multi- and interdisciplinary framework within which students can specialize in one of the following disciplines or combinations of disciplines, under close supervision of a highly qualified research faculty:

Art is inherently public. In this programme, you will study and reflect upon how public arts policy, arts management, arts marketing and education affect the realization of artistic values in society. Art is inherently public. In this programme, you will study and reflect upon how public arts policy, arts management, arts marketing and education affect the realization of artistic values in society.

In the Creative Industries Master's specialisation, you will come to understand a field buzzing with creativity: where art meets commerce, where culture generates sustainability and societal engagement.

The MADtech programme challenges self-driven creators to embrace uncertainty and confront the unknown, with continuous support throughout the process. Students are encouraged to experiment with unfamiliar technologies and learn through hands-on projects. As they explore and prototype, they uncover the hidden mechanics of how technology shapes society and culture. With guidance from both tutors, and guest lectures students take control of their learning and push boundaries, developing critical, innovative work that blends art, design, and technology in unexpected ways. MADtech fosters deep engagement with experimentation, empowering students to navigate complexity and turn the unknown into a creative opportunity.

The interdisciplinary Arts, Cognition and Criticism track focuses on how culture is transmitted, innovated and critiqued through the arts, with course topics such as the arts and reflective imagination; value-negotiation through storytelling; or social and political functions of the arts. Students are trained in methods from the cognitive sciences, hermeneutics, narrative and critical theory, discourse analysis and art sociology. They develop a keen theory-based insight into the role of the arts in cultural dynamics, and hands-on capacities for critical analysis and interpretation of art-works, debates and developments in the arts, in connection to their social background.

MAPs offers an immersive journey where materials act as collaborators, bringing their own urgencies, stories, and ethical dimensions to your work. Through a hands-on, process-driven approach, you will explore sustainable practices, material alternatives, and the interaction between physical structures and personal presence. Here, artistic research focuses on the impact and agency of materials, adding depth to your practice without centering on products.

The Master programme Arts and Culture provides students with the skills needed to investigate the function of the arts in society. It combines in-depth knowledge in a range of specific disciplines with professional and social engagement as well as critical and creative thinking.

Culture can be understood as a complex cognitive process through which humans articulate and negotiate their individual and collective consciousness, identities, values and understanding of the world. The arts have always played an important part in this process.