Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership student Luke Letourneau planning an exhibition install with UNSW Galleries Director, Dr Felicity Fenner. (Photo: Wei-Ling Tseng)
Building on the successes of delivering the professional launch pad Master of Arts Administration degree for 20 years, UNSW Art & Design has pioneered a new kind of postgraduate program in the past year called Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership. It provides deep insight into cultural practice in the dynamic contexts of technology, diversity and globalisation.
Director Dr. Lizzie Muller said curating and cultural leadership are complementary skills.
‘Curating is a form of leadership, but leadership isn’t something restricted to people in certain positions within the hierarchy of an organisation.
‘Leadership is about being able to identify new opportunities in a rapidly changing cultural landscape where settled, traditional way of doing things are no longer where the major growth happens.’
The Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership is a flexible program that enables students to incorporate creative projects into their university work.
‘This specific Masters is not necessarily a year out from your career. It’s actually a way to supercharge your career because we’ve come up with innovative ways of delivering the curriculum so it incorporates projects the students are already working on,’ said Muller.
Graduating student Bev Shroot, is part of a collaborative team that won a City of Sydney grant for an experimental ceramics studio called Kil-n-it. She was able to work on the project as part of her Masters.
‘She could work on her project within a pedagogical structure reflecting on her practice and learning through that process,’ said Muller.
Luke Letourneau, recipient of the inaugural Freedman Curatorial Scholarship awarded each year to a student within the Masters, was able to curate an exhibition in the UNSW Galleries with mentorship from the gallery Director, Dr Felicity Fenner.
Through internships, the Capstone project, and a series of curatorial studios, the program finds ways to embed students’ work in the industry. For Muller, the learning goes both ways as she explains in this piece in The Conversation, about teaching and learning from young cultural leaders.
Applications for the 2016 semester are open at UNSW Art & Design. For more information, visit the website.
Here is a peek at what it’s like to be at UNSW A&D:
