Artcenter College of Design

Artcenter College of Design International Student Insurance

The ArtCenter College of Design, located in Pasadena, California, was established in 1930. It’s a private, nonprofit art and design school that opened in Los Angeles as the Art Center School. In its early years, it attracted such names as photographer Ansel Adams, who served as a guest instructor in the early 1930s, and science fiction author Bruce Sterling. The school began offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1949, adopted its current name in 1965, and moved to its current campus in 1976. Today, the college offers degrees in nine fields: advertising, environmental design, film, fine art, graphic design, illustration, photography, product design, and transportation design. It enrolls about 2,000 students and counting per year, and the school’s symbol is an orange dot.

ArtCenter is unique in that many of its entering undergraduate students already have bachelor’s (or master’s) degrees from other higher education institutions, and the majority of them have worked in their fields of study before enrolling. The school’s reputation has grown recently, as its Art, Industrial Design, and Media Design Practices programs have ranked among the top 20 graduate schools in the U.S. by U.S. News and World Report. Similarly, The Hollywood Reporter added the film programs to its list of the Top 25 Global Film Schools.

ArtCenter operates two campuses in Pasadena, the Hillside Campus and the South Campus. It has also established two permanent satellite studios abroad, ArtCenter Berlin (located in the Bikini Berlin shopping mall complex) and ArtCenter in China.

Notable Alumni

Noteworthy ArtCenter College of Design alumni include film directors Michael Bay and Zack Snyder; Jurassic Park III cinematographer Shelly Johnson; Star Wars conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie; painters Lindsay Dawson, Thomas Kinkade, and Casey Weldon; illustrators Tara McPherson and Marc Burckhardt; NBA photographer Andrew D. Bernstein; movie star Grace Kelly’s fashion photographer Howell Conant; and industrial designer Kenji Ekuan, creator of the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle.

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