We measure our success first and foremost through the creative, professional, civic, intellectual, and economic achievements of our alumni. Consonant with our leadership role, we equip students to succeed in a world of constant change by cultivating their ability to invent, adapt, and persist.

We are a multi-generational teaching, mentoring, and learning environment where students hone their minds, eyes, and hands; develop and refine their voices; acquire skills, knowledge, and literacies to navigate information and cultures; fortify a sense of integrity and conviction; experiment with ideas and take smart, creative risks; and gain experiences to build the confidence and courage needed to actualize their full potential. We believe that our compassionate, inclusive, and collaborative campus community best supports such education.

MICA seeks to serve students of all backgrounds, throughout the nation and across the globe. Our student body is a universe of multiplicity, and our curriculum strives to be correspondingly intersectional and flexible. Understanding of traditions enables new norms and practices. Disciplinary immersion facilitates transdisciplinary creations, increased collaboration with non-arts sectors, and work in multiple fields and modes.

Fulfilling our mission on the world stage, MICA has proud roots in Baltimore and is integral to the city’s fabric as a socially engaged anchor institution. We interact with our urban setting imaginatively and ethically, for the mutual benefit of our diverse student body and Baltimore’s communities. Our pedagogy embraces thoughtful and reciprocal local engagement, which serves as a foundation for building cultural vitality, community empowerment, economic benefits, environmental wellness, and social equity in global communities where our students ultimately live and work. For MICA, engagement is a key strategy to ensure relevance in contemporary art and design making, and is essential to our bold commitment to creative agency at both local and global levels.

Actively evolving to meet its time and the future, MICA contributes to the fields of art, design, and visual arts education through creation, research, and scholarship, as well as sharing of practices and leading by example.