School of Visual Arts Ends Photography MFA Program
Founding Chair Charles Traub said he believed the closure could have been avoided with “better coordination” and more strategies for “how we were going to deal with the future of AI.”
The School of Visual Arts (SVA) will be ending its graduate Photography, Video, and Related Media program in light of the institution's mounting deficit. SVA Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Jason Koth disclosed the program's termination in an email announcement shared with Hyperallergic.
In the announcement, Koth said the MFA Photo candidates will be able to complete their degree without interruption, and that the program would close out in its 40th year with the Class of 2028's graduation. The provost wrote that the “painful decision” to shutter the program was a direct result of “SVA's ongoing economic challenges, the nationwide decline in enrollment in graduate-level photography programs, and broader federal policy and financial headwinds that have made it untenable to sustain the program's current model.”
The termination of the MFA Photo program comes only months after SVA announced that it was ending its graduate degree track in curatorial practice next spring with the retirement of the founder and chair Steven Henry Madoff.
Founding Chair Charles Traub, who launched the Photography, Video, and Related Media program in 1988, lamented the MFA Photo program's closure during a call with Hyperallergic.
“I believe that the closure could have been avoided through better coordination and by rethinking how we were going to deal with the future of AI in a more aggressive way,” Traub said.
