WHO WE ARE

Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, comprises a vibrant community of more than 1,000 creators—dancers, filmmakers, musicians, theater artists, visual artists, and designers unafraid to take risks as they collaborate with our renowned faculty of professional working artists.

Mason Gross graduates emerge not only with a degree but with a commitment to making innovative and purposeful contributions to the wider community—onstage, backstage, in the gallery, the classroom, the studio, and beyond.

The goal: to cultivate thoughtful, engaged, committed artists embracing art as an ever-changing field of possibility.

The school, just 45 minutes from the crackling energy of New York City’s arts scene, serves as the flagship public arts conservatory at Rutgers, a Big Ten research university, home to more than 67,000 students. Rutgers is the nation’s eighth-oldest institution of higher learning and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities.

Our Mission

Mason Gross School of the Arts nurtures curiosity, skill, critical thought, and innovation in creating art and scholarship that touches hearts, challenges minds, imparts joy, and awakens a sense of shared humanity. Embracing our distinctive identity as an arts conservatory within a leading public research university in a richly diverse region with a robust arts scene, we uphold the highest standards of inclusive excellence in artistry, pedagogy, and scholarship while affirming the role of the arts in shaping the world around us. We fulfill this mission by implementing curricula and programming that reflect the world’s diverse artistic traditions, cultivating partnerships with schools and communities throughout New Jersey, creating art that is deeply connected to the social issues of our time, and advancing the arts across Rutgers through teaching, creative activity, advocacy, and collaboration in research that contributes to the public good.

Our Vision

Mason Gross School of the Arts strives to be a global leader in cultivating the arts to improve the human condition, forge connections among individuals and communities, and celebrate the diversity of our world.

Where We’re Going

Mason Gross faculty, students, and staff have worked to chart a course for the school. Explore our Future Roadmap [PDF] and our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan [PDF].

What We Do

Mason Gross offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in art & design, dance, filmmaking, music, and theater. Our faculty are leading the way in creating challenging, rewarding curricula that celebrate the diversity of the arts and prepare students for a wide range of career paths.

We offer numerous courses to the wider university population, some in person and some online through Rutgers Arts Online. Rutgers Community Arts seeks to expand access to the arts through youth and adult programming, including community-engaged arts programs.

Our faculty are among the leading artists and scholars of the arts in the world. We view artistic practice as a form of research, and we celebrate our faculty’s contributions to the expansion of knowledge through their work as performing and visual artists, scholars, and writers.

Our four research centers collaborate with local communities and with scholars across the university and around the world to advance research that serves the public good. The Documentary Film Lab collaborates with researchers across the university and around the world, engaging students in creating documentaries about pressing issues in the sciences, in the history of our local community, and other topics of widespread importance and concern. The Integrated Dance Collaboratory is a hub of interdisciplinary research exploring dance’s unique rehabilitative potential for individuals with a wide range of physical and mental health conditions such as autism, traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, stroke, chronic pain and fibromyalgia, mental illness and cognitive decline. The research-driven Rutgers Print Collaborative cultivates an experiential learning environment for publication, education, and the advancement of prints/multiples. The studio provides guest artists the environment and resources to research topics based on current social issues in the art world—and world at large—through the catalyst of student interaction and experimentation.

The newly formed Arts In Health Research Lab is a collaboration between Mason Gross, the Rutgers School of Public Health, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The lab performs arts-in-health research in New Jersey to benefit populations across the state, has initiated new research strategies, including arts-based research methods and art-as-data collection, and has established a research plan to assess the health impact of NJPAC and Mason Gross arts experiences and programs.