Occidental’s Media Arts & Culture (MAC) department integrates film/media theory and filmmaking/media production, helping you to develop critical and creative skills for engaging in an increasingly participatory media culture.
MAC is the only liberal arts film and media department in the country located in a major metropolitan area. Our close proximity to the Los Angeles media and creative industries means you’ll be able to take advantage of invaluable internships and networking opportunities as you cultivate your own work in a close-knit and collaborative liberal arts environment.
Majors select one of two concentrations: Critical Media focuses on film and media history, visual and digital culture, and new approaches to digital scholarship from video essays to GIS applications. Media Production focuses on hands-on production across a range of evolving fictional, experimental, and documentary-based media forms. Both concentrations include elements of theory and hands-on production. You’ll create a capstone senior comps project that can take many forms: scholarly papers and video essays, hypermedia projects, live-action or animated short films (fiction, documentary, experimental), interactive projects, video installations, feature length screenplays and TV pilot scripts, and more.
MAC fosters graduates who are technically savvy, creatively innovative, critically questioning, and socially engaged on local and global registers. Alumni are charting career paths as media analysts, scholars, museum exhibition designers, curators, and community-engaged activists as well as entering the entertainment industries, working in a variety of roles in mainstream and independent film, television, streaming, and emergent media forms.
