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California Institute of the Arts

MFA: Choreography

The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance

Person with black hair lying face down draped over a shiny silver cube

Choreography by MFA candidate Marissa Brown

Fast-track your opportunities

CalArts’ intensive, two-year Choreography program is an opportunity accelerator for dance artists, propelling MFA candidates toward the development and refinement of their personal aesthetics. A dynamic dance environment embedded within the country’s only comprehensive, accredited college of the visual and performing arts sets the stage for our collaborative graduate program. As an MFA Choreography student, you’ll forge meaningful connections with the peers and faculty mentors that will be the foundation of your network at CalArts and beyond. 

Group of women in casual clothing dancing as confetti falls all around them and covers the floor

Alve Fu, Light as a Feather (MFA thesis project)

Technique and artistry with CalArts Dance

MFA Choreography

With an emphasis on collaborative and professional partnerships as well as comprehensive technical training, CalArts’ MFA in Choreography program prepares graduates to launch their careers as innovative and self-sustaining citizen artists.

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At CalArts, you’ll not only join a legacy of dance practitioners who have helped expand their discipline through innovative choreography, performance, and production—you’ll join a community of artists who will become your collaborators and inspiration in film and video, animation, art, music, theater, and design. Here, partnerships are forged through intensive mentorship from the internationally recognized artists and thinkers comprising our faculty and artists-in-residence, who will support your development as a choreographer through pedagogical training, professional development, and real-world practice.

The MFA in Choreography offers options for concentrations in dance for camera, dance theater, and body x technology, as well as the opportunity to pursue a supplemental concentration in Integrated Media. You’ll find multiple platforms to take your creative work beyond our campus locally, as well as opportunities for research and practice with our partner institutions in Paris, London, Taipei, and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Our curriculum includes seminars addressing topics in professional dance ranging from organizing concepts in choreography and meeting the practical demands of producing concerts, to identifying your overarching artistic and career goals. You’ll also take classes in technique composition, dance theory, costume design, dance production, dance on camera, and digital media and editing.

First-year MFA students are required to create and present three original works. In consultation with the dean, you’ll identify a progression of works created for presentation in various concerts through your first year of residency. Works are presented for feedback during dance showings, a weekly forum that involves all program faculty and students.

Each MFA candidate receives a generous stipend for a final thesis concert, produced in the second semester of your second year. At the outset of year two, you’ll be assigned a committee consisting of the dean and at least three faculty members, who must approve your written proposal before your thesis work commences. You must hold open auditions for this concert, and you’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with artists and designers from all the other metiers within the Institute to fully realize this final final.

CalArts introduced an Arts Education concentration in the fall of 2024, which graduate students may pursue alongside their MFA degree program. MFA Choreography candidates have a variety of teaching opportunities during the residency, including select classes within the undergraduate curriculum. 

Interested in this program?

View our step-by-step application guide to learn more.

Start your application

Admission requirements

To be considered for the BFA Character Animation program, you must complete an application and all program-specific requirements, including an artist statement, a portfolio of representative work, a brief video introduction, and a sketchbook video. Before applying, please familiarize yourself with the detailed application requirements and resources available to assist you in this important process. 

View detailed admission requirements

Degree requirements

Each CalArts MFA Choreography student develops a course of study in consultation with their faculty mentor, and completes three original works in the first year and a graduate independent project/thesis concert in their second in order to complete the program.

MFA Choreography academic requirements

Minors and interdisciplinary opportunities

In addition to CalArts’ naturally collaborative atmosphere, several programs of study may be pursued concurrently with a student’s chosen metier, such as a concentration in Arts Education or Integrated Media..

Learn more about MFA concentrations

Courses you might take

What courses would you take as a graduate student in Choreography? Browse the courses offered in the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance, including opportunities to build high-level proficiencies in performance technique, choreography, dance production technologies, and critical understanding of the art form.

School of Dance Courses

Meet the faculty

At CalArts, faculty and students are collaborators, teaching, learning, and working together as members of our community of artists. 

All Choreography faculty

Dance x Film

Art in motion

Get inspired! Explore a selection of films created with CalArts dance artists.

Slightly out-of-focus image of a person’s head, seen from below, shrouded in translucent fabric.

Hanna Tzong-Han Wu (BFA 22, MFA 24), Dance x Film, Ghosts in You

Some of our alumni

More School of Dance alumni

West Side Story purists, beware.

Alumni Stories

“This role is different than anything I’ve ever done,” said Marissa Brown (Dance MFA 20) of her Broadway debut in Ivo van Hove’s modern adaptation of the beloved musical. “Performing on Broadway feels like another new experience that I’m grateful to navigate through and learn.”

Two groups of dancers face each other, pulling the two characters in the center in opposite directions. The left group wears shades of blue and the right group wears shades of red. They are on a dark city street.

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Want to learn more?

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