School of Visual and Material Culture

Kia ora koutou katoa

The School of Visual and Material Culture is the first of its kind in New Zealand and offers unique opportunities for research at postgraduate level. It is a recently established school within the College of Creative Arts at Massey University's Wellington campus, and its staff include practising artists and theorists whose research is internationally acknowledged in a wide variety of fields. The school provides a centre of teaching and research excellence that seeks to develop new perspectives between people and things in the images, objects and spaces that shape everyday life.

As a meeting place of theoretical and practical disciplines, histories, cultures and worldviews, the school is proactively interdisciplinary in its approach to teaching, learning and research. By breaking down the barriers between the traditional disciplines, students will discover untold or previously marginalised stories.

The school provides a number of core and elective papers to undergraduate students in the areas of critical studies, worldviews and social histories. The postgraduate qualifications offered by the school include Postgraduate Diploma Arts, Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Ph.D (VMC). A postgraduate award from the school provides graduates with appropriate skills to work in areas where critical thinking, trans-disciplinary analysis and critical social research in visual and material culture are of importance. Graduates will therefore be ideally placed to enter a number of professions including gallery and curatorial work, education, tourism, journalism and film librarianship, which have a visual and material culture at their centre.

Associate Professor Tony Whincup
Head of School