About us

Arts University Plymouth offers a wide variety of undergraduate, postgraduate and pre-degree courses in art, design and media. You’ll get access to high quality workshop and studio environments, state-of-the art industry standard equipment, small teaching groups and generous contact hours with academics, technicians and practitioners.

Winner of Gold (2022) and Silver (2023) in the Best Small or Specialist University category at the WhatUni? Student Choice Awards.

Voted as the top Arts University in the UK in the National Student Survey (NSS 2022).

Creativity doesn’t just happen in the studio, workshop or darkroom. It’s a way of life.

A lot has changed at Art University Plymouth since we started out over 160 years ago, but this simple equation of making and living still shapes everything we do.

At Arts University Plymouth, we invite and inspire new modes of creative practice that redefine citizenship in the 21st century. Our undergraduate programmes examine the interconnectedness of the arts and society, exploring distinct disciplines, expanded fields of study, and the spaces emerging between, across and beyond.

Located in the coastal city of Plymouth with many points of access to the world, we encourage our students to work at the threshold of their practice, gaining new knowledge through shifting boundaries and unexpected routes. Studying here, creative practice is not merely aesthetics or making forms, it is making futures — yours and ours.

Our courses

Undergraduate Course

Our three-year BA Honours degrees demand an energetic and inquisitive approach to critically underpinned practice, which is central to all the programmes. As well as producing practical creative outcomes to a range of projects and live assignments you will also be expected to contextualise your ideas culminating in the writing of a dissertation which is often very influential on the development of practical work and vice versa.

Postgraduate Courses 

Our postgraduate programmes invite you to explore and refine your creative practice by critically engaging with the cultural, technological and economic changes that are shaping our world.

At the Postgraduate Centre at Arts University Plymouth, you will find yourself at the heart of a distinctive kind of creative and collegial community – an arts university run by artists and designers, for artists and designers – a space of thinking and making, and your open threshold to an international network of arts and cultural, commercial and industrial practitioners, businesses and institutions in which we engage, exhibit, curate and publish widely.

Pre degree Courses 

Our specialist post-16 study programmes offer ambitious creatives a dedicated Pre-Degree & Sixth Form campus to develop their unique perspective, meet like minded people and gain the sought-after skills necessary to progress onto degree-level study or industry.

Open Days

Take a vital step towards your creative future by coming along to our next open event. Both online and on-campus, our Student Recruitment team are ready to show you around our breathtaking facilities.

Together, we imagine, experiment, think, learn, make things, and make things happen. Whatever you want to make, wherever you want to go, the journey starts here, and never stops.