Media Arts courses | 2026-2027 Graduate Catalog | SIU

This course provides a foundation for creating media art that goes beyond the boundaries of traditional cinema and that challenges the conventional relationship between spectator and screen. Students will create immersive environments and live performances that integrate projections of still imagery with film, video, audio and audience participation. Special areas of concentration will include these histories: Futurism and Surrealism; Fluxus and Happenings; conceptual and performance art practices in the 1960s and 70s; relational aesthetics and social practice; tactical and interventionist media. Project assignments will be both individual and collaborative. Restricted to MFA students in MCMA or consent of instructor. Lab fee: $75.

Credit Hours: 3

This is a special production topics in studio production and practices course for MFA's in Media Arts that focuses on specialized production techniques, topics, techniques, and formal approaches to media making. The course offers the opportunity to gain new techniques and build skills through the use of potentially unfamiliar production equipment and approaches. The class encourages students to explore the edges of their disciplines by providing a focused framework for formal investigation and experimentation. Equipment Usage & Lab fee: $75.

Credit Hours: 3

This hybrid MFA studies and practice course will use a topical starting point for critical study of the histories and philosophies associated with social and scientific movements and paradigms through media and art histories, cultures, and practices. Readings, guest lectures, and field trips delve into the semester theme and contribute to the generation of media art developed through the strategic framework of each artist's practice. Equipment Usage & Lab fee: $75.

Credit Hours: 3

This class examines methods of textual analysis in the media arts with references to their historical, theoretical, and practical contexts.

Credit Hours: 3

A forum for the pursuit of creative projects in the media arts. May be repeated as topic changes. Restricted to CMCMA MFA or PMMM major or consent of instructor or director of Graduate Studies in Mass Communication and Media Arts. Equipment Usage & Lab fee: $50.

Credit Hours: 1-3

Supervised independent creative work in media arts, the exact nature of which is to be determined in consultation with the MFA faculty member. Consent of instructor. Equipment usage fee: $50.

Credit Hours: 1-9

This course provides an in-depth study and discussion of selected topics in media studies. Topics vary and will be announced in advance. This course may be repeated when the topic differs.

Credit Hours: 3

This course is an interdisciplinary forum in which students develop their media arts practice, learn, and implement critique skills and expand their practice as media artists. It is repeated five times, and is taken each in semester of enrollment in the MFA degree program. As students progress through the first year in the program, they are expected to expand their practice within a variety of media arts practices and gain a deeper understanding of the aesthetic and conceptual development of their work in preparation for the first-year review. As students continue through the iterations of the class, they are expected to develop clearly articulated positions about the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical contexts of their work. Restricted to MFA students in the College of Arts and Media, or via consent of instructor and the MCMA Director of Graduate Studies. Equipment Usage & Lab fee: $150.

Credit Hours: 6

Addresses the intersections of politics, economics, and social structures that underpin media arts and industries at global and national levels. Emphasizes the relationship between theories and methods.

Credit Hours: 3

This course critically examines the role and potential impact of the media in enabling, facilitating, and challenging social constructions of gender, gender expression, and sexual identities in U.S. society and globally. We will go far beyond the common discussions of problematic media representations of female beauty and male violence to use theories of gender, gender expression, sexual identity, and gender-based violence to understand contemporary media production and representations. We will explore how objects, social practices, government policies, and even nations can be gendered, and how this functions to create and maintain interlocking systems of oppression. Global in scope, this class will enable us to look within but also well beyond the U.S. to better understand the impact of specific ways of gendering in popular culture and the media's role in this process.

Credit Hours: 3

An in-depth study of the relationship between race and media through the lens of a specific topic. Common themes include critical race theory and ideologies of race, raced representation in media texts, racial and ethnic diversity in media industries, and media as a contested site in the struggle for racial justice. May be repeated when the topic differs.

Credit Hours: 3

Teaches students the core ideas and practices of game narratives. It covers: a) The conceptual fundamentals of theories of game narrative design; b) The technical and organizational process of creating a narrative game. This includes designing and implementing a narrative game using an appropriate software tool. While game narrative is at the center of this course, the skills and knowledge acquired in this class are applicable to broad range of design-centric fields and contexts.

Credit Hours: 3

The MFA Graduate Colloquium is an introduction to graduate studies through encounters with various media artists and researchers. During weekly meetings, individual faculty members introduce students to their research and creative work. The course will also serve as a forum in which students discuss their own research and creative work in an interdisciplinary setting. Presentations by guest lecturers and visiting artists are also a component of this class and are scheduled at the discretion of the instructor. Two semesters of the MFA Graduate colloquium are required of all graduate students in the MFA program in MCMA.

Credit Hours: 3

A practicum course in which students learn the theories, craft, and art of teaching. Topics include course design, lecturing, leading of seminar discussions, assessment, grading strategies, writing and grading essay exams, formulating writing assignments and strategies for responding to student work to produce transformations in learning. Conceptual strategies for how and why to teach in-person and online synchronously and asynchronously. The course also covers skills required to enter the job market in academia. Topics include how to build a research career, how to apply for an academic job, how to successfully negotiate a phone interview and an on-campus interview, and how to succeed as an early assistant professor.

Credit Hours: 3

Thesis requirements may be satisfied only by a creative thesis for the M.F.A. degree in Mass Communication and Media Arts. Minimum of six hours required for the M.F.A. degree in MCMA. Graded S/U. Restricted to students in the M.F.A. degree program. Lab fee: $75.

Credit Hours: 1-6

Thesis requirements may be satisfied only by a written thesis for the M.A. in Media Theory and Research in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts. Minimum of three hours required for the M.A. degree. Graded S/U. Restricted to students in the M.A. degree program in CMCMA.

Credit Hours: 3

Minimum of 24 hours to be earned for the Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Credit Hours: 1-12

For those graduate students who have not finished their degree programs and who are in the process of working on their dissertation, thesis or research paper. The student must have completed a minimum of 24 hours dissertation research or the minimum thesis or research hours before being eligible to register for this course. Concurrent enrollment in any other course is not permitted. Graded S/U or DEF only.

Credit Hours: 1