Category Archives: Undergraduate

Courses for All IMA Students

Innovations in Arts Publications (ARTS-UG 1655)

The ever-inventive world of arts publications encompasses a dazzling range of subjects, mediums, materials, and methods: from ancient illuminated manuscripts, political manifestos, and one-of-a-kind artists books to high-end glossies, handmade zines, posters and print multiples to the infinite possibilities of the digital realm. This workshop will introduce and explore many of these forms through guest lecturers, field trips to specialized collections and museums, directed readings, and hands-on work, which will culminate in final group and individual projects. Readings may include Posters: A Global History; Action Time Vision; and Design: the Invention of Desire.

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

ARTS-UG 1655-000 (9415)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Mon2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Friedman, Lise

Fall 2025 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Art & Design) Undergraduate
Fall 2024

Making Dance: Space, Place and Technology (ARTS-UG 1211)

In this workshop, students will explore the possibilities of dancing across spatial categories, making dances in “real” and digital space. Taking our cues from contemporary experimental and primarily post-modern choreographers, we will examine how our arts practices and beliefs about bodies and space are linked to evolving ideas and cultural systems; we will ask questions that tug at the assumptions of what dance is, what bodies are, what space is, and how these elements are significant as components of choreography and of our dance experiences. We will make and watch dances ranging from low-tech works to high-tech experiments. In addition to making dances, we will read about contemporary dance, technology, and other practices and disciplines (e.g., architecture, philosophy, neuroscience), view performances of choreographers and visual artists, and meet with practitioners engaged in the questions and practices of our study. We will join with CultureHub, an organization housed at La MaMa E.T.C. (one of New York’s most noted experimental theaters) and working at the intersection of art, technology, and community. Readings might include work by Gaston Bachelard, Victoria Hunter, Matthew Frederick, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton, Andrew Gurian, Yi-Fu Tuan, and other artists and scholars. The course is open to all students: anyone interested in dance and/or technology is welcome. Note: all workshop members will be expected to participate as movers!

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2024)

ARTS-UG 1211-000 (16949)09/03/2024 – 12/12/2024 Wed11:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Satin, Leslie

IMA Electives Undergraduate
Summer 2024

Law, Business & Society (SOIM-UB 6)

Every professional businessperson must be aware of how legal systems work and affect business decisions. Furthermore, the interaction between law and business is multidimensional, involving international, ethical, and technological considerations. In this course, students examine how key areas of business law, including contracts, torts, and business organizations, influence the structure of business relationships. Students actively participate in legal studies designed to enhance business skills such as analytical thinking, written communication, oral presentation, conflict resolution, and teamwork problem solving.

Social Impact (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 2 Weeks

Sections (Summer 2024)

SOIM-UB 6-000 (4174)

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

Sustainability and Health (FOOD-UE 1184)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu

The concept of sustainability is important in our current moment, yet we use the term in a variety of ways and via different frameworks of understanding. This course explores how we talk about and understand the concept of sustainability, including as environment and climate change, food production and consumption, and individual and community health. Students will examine the concept of sustainability through these different lenses, exploring the connections among them.

Food Studies (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2024

Experiments in Collective Joy (OART-UT 18)

How do ants or bees organize on a mass scale when their individual brains are incapable of understanding the bigger systems they’re creating together? How did a Twitch hive-mind of 1.2 million people beat Pokémon one collective move at a time? How do we make art that makes us and our audience feel more connected, more alive, more powerful? This hands-on project studio course is about making art where participants are the medium, and the masterpiece created exists inside and between them. Let’s explore community and its connection to transformational, radical joy — not complacent happiness, but a joy that is the feeling of power, agency, and capacity growing within us and within the people around us as we cooperate to overcome shared challenges. Which systems and forms of art, play, and expression foster that kind of joy? This course is heavy on imagination, vulnerability, reading, discussion, experimentation, playtesting, and interactive group activities. Each week explores the relationship of the individual to the group under various lenses and spheres of life (i.e. politics, religion, activism, evolutionary biology, sociology, pleasure, the universe, sports, games, childhood, etc.). Then together, we break down the relationships, dynamics, and effects those systems have, and create multi-media prototypes and performance experiments inspired by these themes and ideas. The early assignments are solo, and then almost all assignments are in groups. The core process of the class uses iterative game design as a structure for ideating, creating, playtesting, and refining, though students are welcome to work in any medium they choose, so long as the goal is to explore themes of collective joy.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2024)

OART-UT 18-000 (7263)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Thu1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Luhrs, August

General Elective Undergraduate
Spring 2024

Reality and Creation (OART-UT 106)

Reality & Creation is an interdisciplinary, collaborative workshop that requires students to develop and present original works using real-life material. While primarily focused on filmmaking – students may also explore writing and performance to investigate the artful manipulation of reality in order to evoke meaning and emotion. Students will explore the meanings of both documentary and narrative filmmaking – and the inherent conflicts between creative construction and telling true stories. They will analyze cinematic representations of reality and devise hybrid works that use inventive and surprising forms while playing with the notion of the real. Over the course of the semester, students will complete a series of classroom/studio projects as well as independent works from non-fiction sources: such as unscripted interviews, archival material, found footage and newsreel. These projects are designed to foster experimentation across the arts disciplines and to cultivate creative collaboration.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

General Elective Undergraduate
Spring 2024

The Making of Economic Policy in the White House (ECON-UB 217)

This course shows students how economic policy gets made, and should get made, at the highest levels of federal government. It draws upon almost fifty years of economic policy-making, and the challenges that have confronted the men and women who have sat in positions of power in the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the National Economic Council. These challenges include the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the transition to a predominantly floating exchange rate world, the era of rampant inflation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition to market economies, the shock of 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed. Lectures and discussions will lead to in-class exercises, in which students will role- play as advisers to US presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. What is it like to sit in the Oval Office and discuss policy with the president? To know that your input into his decisions will impact millions of people? To know that the wrong advice could be calamitous? Students will learn how to analyze policy problems and design solutions, taking into account the multi-dimensional aspects of making federal policy and the many constraints upon those decisions, including of course the influence of Congress. As part of the learning process, students will also have the opportunity to hear from guest speakers who have worked at the very top of economic policy-making in the executive branch of government, and played a role in the policy-making process through their work in the media.

Economics (Undergraduate)
3 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Summer 2024

Berlin: Capital of Modernity (IDSEM-UG 9104)

Some of the most thrilling, momentous, and terrible events of the 1900s occurred in Berlin, which present tales of warning and inspiration to the present century. This four-week interdisciplinary seminar tracks these major events and traces change through the study of primary materials (literature, film, art, buildings, music, political discourse) and secondary readings drawn from a range of disciplines including history, sociology, philosophy, and critical theory. Berlin’s streets, buildings, memorials, and cultural monuments offer cautionary tales about the folly of nationalist ambition; inspiring sagas of intellectual and physical courage; cold testimonials of crime and retribution; lyrical ballads of brutal honesty; personal records of hope and despair. From one perspective, all of these narratives are episodes in an epic whose grand and central scene is World War II; this is the point of view to be adopted in this course. Students will take in many of the sights and sounds of old and contemporary Berlin but will focus on the involvement of twentieth-century, Berlin-based politicians, activists, artists, architects, bohemians, writers, and intellectuals with the causes, experience, and consequences of World War II. Our period of study begins just before the outbreak of World War I and ends during the astonishing building boom of the post-Wall 1990s and early 2000s.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 6 Weeks

Sections (Summer 2024)

IDSEM-UG 9104-000 (3987)at NYU Berlin (Global)Instructed by Hornick, Karen · Smoler, Fredric

Cultures and Contexts Undergraduate

Fashion, Culture & the Body (IDSEM-UG 9254)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

This is a course that explores the relationship between ideas, the body and the way that fashion can be understood to mediate between the two. Through a range of disciplines and media this course considers the body as an aspect of not only medical and scientific exploration, but crucially as a vital element of culture and society. Bodies affect the ways in which the social world and power relations are organized, and they even arguably condition the way that we understand reality itself. Our physical form is constantly shaped according to both philosophies and fashions. Body ideals and broader ideals often interrelate strongly through bodily practices and with what we wear. There are meanings and fashions in all bodily forms (skinny, buxom, muscular, ideas of ’whiteness’) and body practices (dieting, hair management, cleansing rituals, plastic surgery and genital cutting). Over the sessions, we will take a conceptual approach to fashion, as a strident condition of modern life, that incorporates politics, science and aesthetics and we will closely read a number of cultural texts against a number of theoretical models. Attitudes towards the body can vary widely according to historical period, and this course will explore how, in different moments, and via different media, we have been preoccupied with the aesthetics of different body zones, with displaying identity (gender, class and ethnicity), and also with power. Different cultural forms (literary, visual, material etc) will provide the focus of our discussions as they all engage with the different ways that we make meaning out of our bodies. Students will be invited to investigate in their written work set texts from class in addition to primary material of their own choice.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Global Fashion Industry: Britain (PRACT-UG 9250)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-LONDON: The Global Fashion Industry and British Fashion aims to introduce fashion history and theory in its contemporary social and cultural context. The course will examine various aspects of the fashion industry and offer an understanding of critical concepts such as social identity, consumer culture and globalization. Students will explore aspects of the British fashion industry, including fashion media, retail environments, fashion exhibitions and the impact of sub and counter culture.

Practicum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Fall 2023

Hyper Object (COART-UT 700)

The object, in reality, is anything but inert – it is hyperactive, changing in function and meaning as it moves in time and space. This studio-based course will give students the tools to use objects and materials specifically and deliberately in their work. The course will link intuitive making with research, allowing students to investigate their genuine and unique interests and develop their conceptual goals. During the course of the semester, students will be exposed to a wide range of non-traditional objects and materials that have been employed by artists throughout history. Readings and viewings will supplement the work done in the studio, with four themed sections serving as guided warm ups for a final project of the students’ own direction. These sections are titled: The Other, The Icon, The Minuscule, The Massive. Each student will make a work based on each theme, and group critiques will function as a laboratory in which students can test theories on display, context, form and legibility. This course is best suited to those with an interest in nontraditional art materials, collage, and found objects. Prior experience in sculpture or painting will be particularly helpful, however, it is not required.

Collaborative Arts (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

General Elective Undergraduate

Lighting: (PHTI-UT 1013)

Prerequisite: Photography II or permission from the Department. This class teaches lighting as a series of the most common lighting problems encountered in professional photography and cinematography. The course philosophy is that the most complex and difficult lighting problems are really just combinations of small, easily resolved, problems. Starting with basic three-point lighting for portraiture using simple continuous source lighting, the course will progress quickly to extremely complex set ups using electronic flash as well as lighting for the new generation of hybrid Dslr’s (video/still camera) as it moves through multiple environments. Subjects covered include: Lighting for portraits, still life, fashion, interiors, documentary, and exterior location lighting using battery powered flash. Location scouting and planning according to location limitations. Color temperature and color control. Light shaping and control. Students will learn how to use: Digital SLR’s, medium format cameras, Leaf Aptus electronic capture, direct tethered capture using Adobe Lightroom, continuous lighting, electronic flash, color temperature meters and custom white balance profiles as well as the basics of video/sound capture. Lighting equipment is provided. A lab fee is charged for this course.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 2491
Section #: 001
Meets: TR 2:30-7p

Fall 2025 General Elective Spring 2026 Summer 2025 Summer 2026 Undergraduate
Fall 2024

Useless Machines (IMNY-UT 272)

“Useless Machines is about redefining “usefulness.” Through making, we will explore what it means, on an ideological, political and historical level, to create something ‘useful’ or ‘useless.’ We will play with these definitions and explore how these objects serve to be humorous, critical, disruptive and at times… useful. We will study ‘useless’ machines throughout history, which will provoke conversations and disagreements around the implications of existing and emerging technologies. The students will design ‘useless’ machines for their final project. Examples of ‘useless’ machines are drawn from Kenji Kawakami’s The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, Dunne & Raby’s Speculative Everything, Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina 48, https://esoteric.codes/, CW&T, Mimi Ọnụọha’s Missing Data, Jacques Carelman’s Catalogue of Impossible Objects, viral videos/objects and much more.”

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 11364
Section #: 001
Meets: MW 2-3:30p

IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Spring 2025 Undergraduate

Digital Media: Context and Practice (MCC-UE 1031)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu

This course introduces students to basic digital composition in the context of research and practice-based project development. Students explore practices in digital multimedia production, web design and development, digital imaging, sound and video editing applications, scripting in HTML and CSS, and the operation of production equipment. Students conduct fieldwork and site-specific ethnographic research on a significant issue in the local context and present their findings through the design of a web-based portfolio.

Media, Culture & Communication (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Fall 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Cultures & Contexts: Multicultural France (CORE-UA 9547)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue

With an important history of immigration, France has long been a site of cultural contact and exchange. This course considers the country’s multicultural make-up and the ideologies, institutions, conflicts, and paradoxes that shape how that diversity has taken form through time. Conflicts and controversies of the past 40 years, which include the rise of the extreme right, the problem of the disadvantaged suburbs, the question of Islamic headscarves, and more, have in particular pushed these questions to the front of the country’s domestic agenda. Looking historically and across several case studies, we ask as well as what the French example can add to our understanding of culture, diversity, and race. Conducted in English.

College Core Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Editing I (FMTV-UT 1016)

This is a hands-on course designed to introduce the student to narrative and documentary editing techniques, and to the role of the editor in shaping the final form of film and video productions. Good editing is crucial to the success of every film and video. This class is recommended to students pursuing directing or producing who want a better understanding of how the post-production workflow functions, as well as to any student, from sophomore to senior, who would like to gain a clearer understanding of the role of the editor as an artist, a technician and a collaborator. To achieve this, the class will delve into the methods, objectives, and technical aspects of post-production. It will thoroughly explore two major editing programs (Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro) used in today’s professional post-production environment, and acquaint the student with every stage of the editing workflow from capture to final output. Students will learn to approach these and other non-linear programs as variations on common themes rather than as completely new and foreign tools. In addition, the class will present examples of edited sequences from both narrative and documentary films for discussion, and have invited guests who will share their experiences in bringing films to completion. There will also be a course pack of assigned readings. This course allocates as a Craft for Film & TV majors.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12786
Section #: 001
Meets: T 6:20-9p


Class #: 12787
Section #: 002
Meets: W 3:30-6:10p


Class #: 12788
Section #: 003
Meets: W 6:20-9p


Class #: 12789
Section #: 004
Meets: R 6:20-9p


Class #: 24079
Section #: 005
Meets: M 6:20-9p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Summer 2025 Summer 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2024

Science in Our Lives: Facts and Lies in the Name of Science (SCIED-UE 218)

Students explore how science became a global form of knowledge making about the natural world, how European notions of science contributed to its growth as a form of systematic knowledge, how some people were excluded from this process, and how bias and discrimination were made real. By observing, measuring, analyzing and explaining data, students learn to produce and evaluate the quality of scientific knowledge and to recognize how science understanding helps to interrogate the construction of difference between facts and lies. Fulfills Life Science Core requirement.

Science Education (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Physical Science OR Life Science Undergraduate