Popular Culture
Are you a future artist? At the Academy of Popular Culture, we will coach you to become an artistic professional and creative entrepreneur. To achieve your ambitions in the artistic world, you will create work as a performer, as a writer/composer or as a visualiser/ designer while forging connections with your prospective audience. You want to make an impact with the concepts you create. In order to do so, you will work with students of other disciplines to produce an interdisciplinary performance.
As a professional, you gain inspiration from your own ambitions as well as your engagement with your audience and with society in general. You want to contribute and make an impact with your story. This is something you’ll rarely do on your own: to make your projects come to life, you’ll need to work with others who can help you with things that you’re not (yet) familiar with. You’ll be learning as part of a community whose members inspire each other. The main focus throughout this broad, interdisciplinary degree programme is on the creation of products for an audience. Sharing your story with the audience is the key to making an impact. The Academy of Popular Culture is located in the bustling cultural hotspot that is the northern student city of Leeuwarden.
Our commitment to you is that we’ll take active steps to challenge you, meet your learning needs, provide appropriate supervision throughout and help you reach the right level for professional practice. Instead of traditional classrooms, we make use of communities of learners, whose members inspire and stimulate each other and help each other out with feedback and ideas. You’ll learn to adopt inquisitive working practices, develop a vision on your place as a performer and make well-reasoned choices when it comes to elaborating, organising and realising your projects. This will help you track your progress and figure out your next steps. You’ll be coached by experienced lecturers, most of whom are also active in the professional field. This helps to blur the boundary between education and professional practice.
1. After registration, you will receive a message from us with the request to upload your portfolio and appendices (for content and design of this portfolio see instruction portfolio).
2. This portfolio contains your own artistic work with an explanation and a one-minute video (for content and criteria see Assignment One-minute film).
3. You ensure that your portfolio including the film assignment and audiovisual attachments are uploaded or submitted via Osiris before or on the final submission date.
4. You will eventually receive an invitation for an admission assessment (for the content and criteria of this assessment, read the admission assessment instruction).
In order to be admitted to the programme, it's essential that you already have some experience in a particular cultural field. For example, you sing in a band, design posters, create videos or are involved in organising a festival.
Our graduates end up as artistic professionals in the cultural field. Some set up their own business, but most join a collective or a changing roster of partnerships. The main focus throughout this broad, interdisciplinary degree programme is on the creation of products for an audience. Graduates perform on stage, write songs, produce tracks, create short or full-length feature films or visuals, develop festivals, dress sets or host podcasts and websites where they present themselves or others. Sharing your story with the audience is the key to making an impact.
