©Dionne Lee, Assistant Professor

Each installment of In Focus: The MFA Review highlights a different MFA program for photographic artists, offering readers a concise overview of its identity, curriculum, faculty, student experience, financial support, and post-graduation outcomes. It also serves as a showcase of the creative work produced by faculty, students, and alumni. Rather than functioning as rankings or endorsements, these features are intended as practical starting points—tools to help prospective students compare programs, identify what matters most to them, and make more informed decisions about their graduate education. While certain details shared in these articles may change over time, my hope is that these program snapshots offer a clear sense of what each represents in the present moment.

Thank you to Gina Osterloh and others for completing this interview and compiling all the images/resources!

Institution name: The Ohio State University

Degree Title: MFA in Art

Location: Columbus, OH

Link to Program Page: https://art.osu.edu/prospective-students/graduate-studies

Link to Application Page: https://art.osu.edu/grad-studies/admission/apply

Link to Visiting Artist Program: https://art.osu.edu/about/visiting-artist/past-visiting-artists

Instagram: @osu_art_

©Jared Thorne, Associate Professor

Tell us a little about your program. How would you define its scope and purpose?

We offer the MFA in Art (with specializations in Art and Technology, Ceramics, Film/Video, Glass, Painting/Drawing, Photography, Printmaking, or Sculpture). The program is structured flexibility allowing students to chart their own path among these 8 areas.  The Department of Art offers a 66-semester-hour graduate MFA terminal degree,  catering to students wishing to pursue a career making art and teaching art.  Our MFA engages graduate students in a curriculum that is hands-on, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and research-based. We emphasize understanding of arts and culture, especially visual culture, in a global, culturally diverse, and technological society.

©Jared Thorne, Associate Professor

What would you say makes your program special?

Full tuition remission plus stipend and 100% subsidized student healthcare for three years. We have state of the art facilities and renowned faculty (including 3 Guggenheim Award recipients since 2019). Students are provided private or semi-private studio spaces with 24/7 access for the duration of their studies.

In addition to departmental funding for graduate work, additional grant opportunities are available through the Division of Arts & Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences, and centers and departments such as Global Arts + Humanities, the Center of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.  Students also benefit from proximity to and collaborations with the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and much more.

©Jared Thorne, Associate Professor

What specialized facilities are available for student use (i.e. darkroom, lighting studio, print lab)?

Our photography facilities include two large darkrooms that support silver gelatin printing, alternative processes, as well as 16mm motion picture film processing; a lighting studio with strobe lights, digital print lab with two wide-format Canon printers,  high resolution digital cameras; film scanning technologies. Please also see our Department website for our vast facilities in art & technology, sculpture, glass, printmaking, painting/drawing, ceramics, and film/video. The Department of Art also has the Living Art & Ecology Lab (LAEL) which supports interdisciplinary creative research related to human relationship with the environment. Students also have access to ACCAD, the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design.

©Carmen Winant, Professor

Is your program strictly photography-focused, or does it encourage/allow interdisciplinary work?

We support what each individual MFA students wants to pursue– we support interdisciplinary work and conversely, if an MFA student wants to work solely in photography, we 100% support them.

Do you specialize in a particular area (i.e. documentary, experimental, environmental work)?

Each faculty member is able to support a range of photographic methodologies. A big strength of the MFA Program is that the professor-artists working directly with photography span a range of practices.

©Carmen Winant, Professor

And once in the program, is a student able to shift their focus if their creative interests change?

We support an MFA student’s journey! Alum Benedict Scheuer entered the program working with more traditional photography which evolved into sculptures and drawings on silk. Samuel Lo (MFA, 2026) has created an expansive range of photographic methods from color inkjet prints, scanning black and white film, to performances for the camera and printing on laser-cut Plexi. His series Waypoints (2025-2026) unites these photographic forms and a vast community of multiracial Asian American artists of the past, present, and future.  Samuel Lo’s artistic strategies include combining staged performances for the camera and vernacular everyday photographs of friends and family in Hong Kong, Maryland, Ohio, and Hawai’i. His photographs also depict the Milky Way galaxy, photographs of oceans and rivers, in tandem with photographs of his body submerged in water from geographical locations that are “Waypoints” (also the title of his thesis exhibition)– ancestral and chosen family sites that are guides and waypoints in his life.

©Gina Osterloh, Associate Professor

How structured is the curriculum? Are there required courses, or is it more self-directed?

There are required courses including a first-year seminar and the 3^rd year Thesis and Research course.   Beyond those two required seminars, students, choose from a range of courses in the department and connect with a variety of exciting research and academic departments across the university. Many of the hours  consist of independent study units with various faculty members.

©Gina Osterloh, Associate Professor

Does the program incorporate video work or emerging media such as AI, VR/AR, or 3D/360 imaging?

Yes! We have all of these technologies and tremendous faculty who specialize in these fields and all of our faculty are exhibiting artists in the world. The Ohio State University also has ACCAD, the Advanced Computing Center for Art & Design.

©Roger Beebe, Professor

Does the program offer career development support, such as portfolio reviews, workshop/conference attendance, or networking opportunities?

The program brings in visiting artists, curators, and cultural workers to foster networking. Cineseries is a tremendous MFA student curated film program, and the films are screened in the Film Video Theater at the Wexner Center for the Arts. This Autumn SPE will be at The Ohio State University. We have collaborative programming with the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Columbus Museum of Art. Recently, visiting artist Walid Raad did a workshop with MFA students about the art of the artist talk! Columbus Museum of Art Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Daniel Marcus gave a talk to graduate students, sharing his recent curatorial experience and path into and through the museum world. One big networking advantage of our program is that in addition to The Ohio State University’s large interdisciplinary community and arts in Columbus– is that we are surrounded by other cities with strong arts programming such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

©Taylor Dorrell, MFA Candidate

What are key graduation requirements (exhibition, thesis paper, portfolio, etc.)?

Key graduation requirements are successful  completion of 66 credit hours of coursework.  The MFA Thesis Exhibition and an oral defense of the student’s installed work in the exhibition is required. Ohio State University also requires a minimum 8-page paper which is archived by the OSU Libraries online.

©Taylor Dorrell, MFA Candidate

Who are your current faculty members?

Faculty members who facilitate and contribute to the Photography Area MFA Graduate Critiques are Jared Thorne, Dionne Lee, and Gina Osterloh. With this said, many of our faculty activate photography and its expanded field including non-area affiliated and Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair Professor Carmen Winant, Film/Video Professor Roger Beebe, Painting and Drawing Professor Suzanne Silver, Sculpture Professor Alison Crocetta, and Art & Technology Professors Illya Mousavijad,  Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman who is the Director of ACCAD. Our program is interdisciplinary, and the list of all our faculty is on our website: https://art.osu.edu/people

What are their areas of creative interest?

Professor Gina Osterloh’s photo tableaux and performances for the camera address the intersections of visual perception and identity. Osterloh’s work was featured in Aperture magazine’s issue “Being & Becoming: Asian in America” 2023.  Professor Carmen Winant’s work challenges the ways we understand women’s power, pleasure, labor, healing, and liberation through large scale installations, public art, and collage. Professor Jared Thorne works in the documentary tradition, his current work documents Planned Parenthood buildings, many of them recently closed, immersed in their surrounding landscapes throughout Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  Professor Dionne Lee works in range of mediums including collage, darkroom techniques, video and drawing. As stated in Lee’s recent interview in Aperture magazine with Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, which is from Lee’s monograph Dionne Lee: Currents (Aperture, 2026), Dionne Lee’s work speaks to relationships of “land, power, survival and Black identity,” and how, “belonging is something to be cultivated.”

©Annelise Duque, Alum

Are faculty members primarily full-time or adjunct?

For MFA coursework, faculty members are full-time professors. Many of our undergraduate 2000 and 3000 level courses are taught by adjunct instructors and Graduate Teaching Associates. And we have tremendous adjunct instructors teaching our undergraduate photography courses including Guggenheim Fellow Laura Larson, Becca Copper whose art practice encompasses photography and social practice, Geren Heurtin, and alum Samuel Lo, Marcus Morris who was recently awarded a CPW Center of Photography Woodstock residency, and Matty Machado. Laura Larson also teaching our undergraduate Art 5000 Professional Practices course.

©Annelise Duque, Alum

How involved are faculty in mentoring students beyond coursework?

Faculty are very involved through independent study units, the teaching seminar which supports our MFA students with teaching methodologies, extensive thesis committee meetings, writing letters of recommendation, and introducing students to networks outside the university.

How often do guest artists, curators, or critics visit for lectures and/or critiques?

Each course has the support to bring in at least one visiting artist, and each semester the Department of Art at OSU has two high profile visiting artists who conduct studio visits and a public lecture.  Please see our visiting artist page! Students also engage with additional visiting artists hosted by the Department of the History of Art, the Center for Global Arts + Humanities, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Columbus Museum of Art.

©Annelise Duque, Alum

How many students are admitted each year, and how many are photography focused?

9 – 14 are accepted per admission cycle for our MFA program and from the students admitted each year approximately two per year are photo focused.

What is the approximate cohort size, and what effect does this have on critiques, collaboration, and networking?

In the Photography Area, we have approximately 5 to 6 MFA students for our Photography Area critiques, and each MFA cohort year is 9 to 14 students which opens up many opportunities for collaboration. Our MFA students foster collaboration within and outside the Department of Art.

©Annelise Duque, Alum

What kind of work are current students creating?

Our current photo-based students are working with documentary approaches laying bare histories of red-lining and the construction of freeways in Columbus, Ohio; histories of labor; queer Appalachia families; intergenerational connections and ancestral lineages; performances for the camera; photograms of gauze; the intimacy of breath; and connections between pandemics such as Covid-19 and the AIDS crisis.

©Samuel Lo, Alum

What is the total cost of the program (and duration), and what funding options are available?

This is the greatest benefit of being part of the MFA program. As mentioned, it is tuition if fully covered plus a teaching stipend and healthcare benefits.

Are there teaching assistantships, and what percentage of tuition do they cover?

As mentioned, Graduate MFA students in the Department of Art teach one course per semester and receive 100% tuition covered plus a stipend and healthcare. On occasion (recently it has been one or two every year) exceptional MFA students are selected by a university committee and receive a Fellowship which allows the same tuition and healthcare coverage but without the teaching duty.

©Samuel Lo, Alum

Are additional grants/resources available to support student projects?

Yes! There is the smaller Fergus Materials Grant within the Department of Art, and from the university there are several large grants and fellowships that students can apply for. Since we are a R1 university, there are several competitive additional funding opportunities students can apply to.

©Samuel Lo, Alum

What types of careers to alumni pursue, and how does the program support students after graduation?

Our alumni pursue careers as educators, curatorial assistants, assistant professors, editorial photographers, commercial photographers. We write strong letters of recommendation and stay in communication with our alum.

How connected is the alumni network, and do graduates stay involved with the program?

Many graduates stay to teach for a year or two and therefore maintain access to facilities. We are currently in the process of working on our alumni database. Graduate students often stay involved with the program through the thesis committee they chose and faculty they establish mentorship with.

©Marcus Morris, Alum

©Marcus Morris, Alum