Education Tailored to Your Interests

Whatever your major, you have the freedom to focus many of your course choices around your personal interests. We've outlined the following Areas of Study to give you a sense of what is available here at PNCA.

Art and Technology

These courses cover a range of practices, histories, and theoretical investigations that explore cultural production as generated, augmented, or informed by technology. Key resources are our Digital Production Studio, Design Arts studios, Animated Arts and Video and Sound facilities, Mediatheque, and Make + Think + Code.

  • ​Digital Media Strategies
  • Digital Print Production
  • ​Digital Tools
  • Fundamentals of Interactive Media
  • Interface and Structure
  • Interactive Aesthetics
  • Math: Introduction to Programming/Coding
  • Motion Graphics
  • Object Design/Digital Fabrication
  • Screens and Devices: Intermediate Interactive Aesthetics
  • Structures and Strategies
  • Time Arts
  • Writing with Digital Media​​​​​​​​​



Community Engagement

These courses delve into histories, theories, and practices of cultural production and cooperative and collaborative strategies that directly impact communities. These can be inclusive of partnerships, networks, pedagogy, program development, and service based projects.

  • Art and the Everyday
  • Art, Ethics and Transgression
  • Global Culture: Art and Ecology
  • Homeland: The American Landscape
  • Off Site Projects
  • Social Practice: Art and Community
  • Theory and Practice: Art in Context
  • Collaboration, Facilitation, and Participation (Graduate)
  • Design Build (Graduate)
  • Problem Identification, Stakeholder Engagement, Community Learning Lab (Graduate)
  • Internships

Craft and Material Studies

Courses in this category focus on hands-on skill development with a range of craft processes focusing on materials including paper, clay, glass, metal, fibers, wood, metal, and wood.

Close up of student using a lathe to carve a wood project in the Falcon Building Wood Shop Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA).

  • ​Artist Publications
  • Black and White Photography
  • Ceramics
  • Etching and Lithography
  • Experimenting with Materials
  • Figure Sculpture
  • Letterpress and Book Arts
  • Multiples: Mold Making and Casting
  • Printmaking Studio
  • Soft Sculpture
  • Screen and Relief Printing
  • Welding
  • Internships​​

Critical Studies

Courses in this category cover a range of topics including contemporary art theory, ethics, class, critical race theory, women’s studies, as well as emerging fields such as disability and intersectional discourse.

  • Anthropology: People, Places, Resources
  • Art and the Everyday, Narrative
  • Art and Anthropology
  • Art and Philosophy
  • Art and Politics
  • ​Art and Psychology
  • Art and Religion​
  • Art, Ethics and Transgression
  • Art in Context
  • Character and Identity
  • Contemporary Art Theory
  • Ethics
  • Everything Must Go: Art and Economics
  • Feminist Theory
  • Global Culture: Art and Ecology
  • Homeland: The American Landscape
  • Literature Seminar: Feminist Literature
  • Literature Seminar: Poetics of the Anthropocene
  • Literature Seminar: Queer Literature
  • Perspectives on Society and Culture: Gender and Sexuality (multiple topics)
  • Protest Propaganda
  • Queer Theory
  • Research for Creative Practice
  • Theory and Practice: Body Politics, Image, Text, Media
  • Utopia/Dystopia
  • Critical Theory 1 (Graduate)
  • Ethics and Visual Culture

Digital Fabrication

Courses in this category focus on hands-on skill development with prototyping including print production, 3D prototyping and production, lasercutting, vinyl cutting, and operation of CNC routing machines.

Creative Technology Lab 3-D Printing Screen Makerbot

  • 2D Digital Print Production
  • Capsule Collection
  • Color Digital Photo
  • Cultural Marketplace
  • Digital Media Strategies
  • Intermediate Color Digital Photography
  • Object Fabrication
  • Production
  • Project Incubator​​

Entrepreneurial Studies

These courses are designed to support the development of a range of entrepreneurial skills. The offerings are further expanded to include events and workshops offered through PNCA's Office of Career Design.

  • Capsule Collection
  • Cultural Marketplace
  • Professional Practice
  • Project Incubator
  • ​Internships
  • Entrepreneurial Studies (Graduate)
  • Professional Practice (Graduate)

Gender Studies

Courses in this category address fields of such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, queer theory, or women’s studies.

Maggie Nelson profile image

  • Character and Identity
  • Character Design
  • Feminist Theory
  • Literature Seminar: Feminist Literature
  • Literature Seminar: Queer Literature
  • Perspectives on Society and Culture: Gender and Sexuality
  • Queer Theory
  • Research for Creative Practice
  • The Costumed Figure
  • The Figure
  • Theory and Practice, Body Politics

An audience looking at a purple art installation

Interactive Media

Courses in this category cover a range of practices, histories and theoretical investigations that explore cultural production tied to the experiential capacities of web, video, animation, apps, gaming, motion graphics, projection mapping, performance, electronics, augmented and virtual reality.  Key resources are our Digital Production Studio, Design Arts studios, Animated Arts and Video and Sound facilities, the Mediatheque, and  Make+Think+Code.

  • Activated Object
  • Fundamentals of Interactive Media
  • History of Design Arts
  • History of New Media
  • Image, Text, Media
  • Interactive Aesthetics
  • Interface and Structure
  • Intermediate Animated Aesthetics
  • Math: introduction to Programming/Coding
  • Motion Graphics
  • Performance
  • Project Incubator
  • Screens and Devices
  • Writing with Digital Media

Media Production

Courses in this category cover a range of practices to build  hands on skills and proficiencies related to digital media, photography, moving image, sound,  performance media, and multi-media production.

  • Advanced Color Photography, Digital
  • Animated Arts: Junior Film: Concept to Production
  • Animated Documentary
  • Animated Installation
  • Beginning Color Photography, Digital
  • Beginning Sound
  • ​Beginning Video
  • Intermediate Sound
  • Intermediate Video
  • ​Lighting Essentials
  • Motion Graphics
  • Projection Mapping
  • Projection, Sound, and Space​​​​​​

Projected typography design by Xela Goldstein. 2016 Communication Design thesis project at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA).

Media Studies

Courses in this category cover a range of topics addressing the platforms, contests, and contexts of mass media.

  • Art, Society and Mass Media
  • History of Design
  • History of Printed Matter
  • History of Photography
  • History of the Moving Image
  • History of New Media
  • Protest Propaganda
  • ​Theory and Practice: Image, Text, Media​​​​​

Narrative Forms

Narrative Forms courses span creative writing, short forms, documentary, and sequential art (comics and graphic novels).

Pacific Northwest College of art (PNCA) 2012 student Qathi Hart working in a dark room with one light source to capture stop-motion animation frames through a layering apparatus.

  • Artist Publications
  • Graphic Novel
  • ​Intermediate Video
  • Junior Film: Concept to Production
  • Narrative Intensive
  • Narrative Strategies
  • Poetry Intensive
  • Structures and Strategies
  • Short Forms
  • Theory and Practice: Narrative
  • Writing with Digital Media​​​​​





11 majors, 10 minors, endless possibilities

Browse our eleven undergraduate majors from A to V.

Undergraduate Programs