Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing)
MA Arts Practice (Arts, Health, and Wellbeing) is a part-time, 18-month course focused on using the arts to foster positive change. You'll generate creative projects which raise awareness and engage communities. The course features dynamic workshops that explore wellbeing, and insights from the latest research to build professional skills.
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Key Course Details
Ready to combine your love for the arts with a passion for improving health and wellbeing? Use your creativity to drive positive change and make a real impact.
DESIGNED FOR
MA Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) is ideal for artists, creative professionals, therapists, community workers, teachers, and others interested in pursuing a career in arts, health, and wellbeing. It supports those looking to develop their professional practice and make a positive impact within this field.
Career Paths
- Freelance Arts Practitioner
- Arts in Health Coordinator
- Arts Development Officer
- Founder of your own start-up
- Project Manager
Skills taught
- Creative Exploration and Reflection
- Communication and Presentation
- Collaborative planning
- Project Design and Evaluation
- Professional Networking
Course Highlights
Module Overview
MA Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) delves into the transformative power of the arts to meaningfully support our communities. Throughout this 18-month journey, you'll cultivate your creative voice, engage with diverse art forms, refine your practice, and foster your professional growth.
Research and Development of Creative Practice
You’ll explore arts, health, and wellbeing practices, networks, research, and evaluation methods. You’ll develop a literature review about a topic of your own interest. You will learn about reflective practice and relevant methodologies for your discipline.
Arts Practice 1 – Review and Develop
This module helps you engage with your first project to deepen your artistic practice and reframing your work within health and wellbeing. It runs alongside the Research module, linking theoretical learning to your practical development.
Professional Practice within Arts, Health and Wellbeing
You’ll focus on communicating your practice through digital and physical media. You’ll gain employability skills by learning about evaluation and quality frameworks in arts, health, and wellbeing contexts.
Arts Practice 2 – Progress and Situate
Building on Arts Practice 1, this module helps you confidently position your work in the field. You’ll create a project proposal for a self-directed project, and explore project design in more depth.
Teaching for the second year of the course begins in October and is completed in the following March. During the final six months of the course, you will complete the remaining 60 credit module for the MA.
Arts Practice 3 – Refine and Resolve
As your culminating module you will design and manage a major, ambitious arts project and engage with data collection and analysis, arts-based research, and a critical evaluation of your work.
Course Highlights
How you’ll learn
You'll learn through a mix of in-person and online sessions on the MA Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) course. You'll attend weekend sessions featuring workshops and guest speakers. In between, you'll take part in online tutorials that align with your modules, offering extra guidance and support. Your progress will be assessed through practical projects, research folios, and proposals, giving you the opportunity to apply your learning to real-world situations. You'll also regularly evaluate and improve your work, with continuous feedback from tutors and industry professionals to support your development.
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Teaching staff
Our MA Arts Practice staff are actively involved in research and bring a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and professional experience across various arts practices. You’ll benefit from interdisciplinary teaching by a team with extensive experience in visual arts, performance, arts education, project management, and practice within NHS, public, and community contexts. Additionally, experienced guest speakers will provide valuable insights throughout the course.
Dr Thania Acarón – Course Leader – (dance movement psychotherapist, arts in health specialist and researcher)
Heather Parnell – Lecturer – (visual artist, specialist in public art, collaborative practice and art in healthcare contexts)
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Projects
MA Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) has a strong tradition of collaborating with a diverse range of partners, reflecting the aspirations and professional interests of our students. You’ll have the opportunity to arrange your own projects, with guidance and support from our experienced teaching team. Attracting students from across the UK, many projects and placements are tailored to your local area, allowing you to make a meaningful impact in your community while developing your practice.
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Facilities
Our Cardiff campus is equipped with everything you need to bring your ideas to life, from photographic darkrooms and professional printers to video and audio production studios. After an induction, you can borrow a full range of equipment, including cameras, microphones, and lighting. Our specialist library provides a wide selection of textbooks, research journals, and online resources, along with an inter-library loan service to access even more materials.
Some of our graduates have secured a place in Startup Stiwdio, USW’s incubator for freelance artists and startups.
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ENTRY REQUIREMENTS
Typical qualification requirements:
This course is aimed at graduates with a minimum 2:2 Honours degree or exceptional equivalent experience who would like to broaden their existing knowledge and open up a new career path.
We welcome applications from students from a wide variety of fields.
A current and ongoing arts practice is required for the course. This can be in any medium of arts (visual art, crafts, dance, music, performance, theatre, film, creative writing or installation, experimental arts and others).
For your application:
You are required to submit a portfolio with 5 photos or a 2 minute video demonstrating examples of your best practice.
Please send a focused personal statement, you must respond to the following questions:
- Tell us more about your arts practice?
- Why are you interested in arts, health and wellbeing?
- How has your experience, skills and education to date prepared you for the course?
Closed for International applicants
Unfortunately, this course is not currently open to international applicants, please visit our course pages where you can find an alternative course choice.
Contextual offers
We may make you a lower offer based on a range of factors, including your background (where you live and the school or college that you attended, for example), your experiences and individual circumstances (as a care leaver, for example). This is referred to as a contextual offer, and we receive data from UCAS to support us in making these decisions.
USW prides itself on its student experience and we support our students to achieve their goals and become a successful graduate. This approach helps us to support students who have the potential to succeed and who may have faced barriers that make it more difficult to access university.
We're here to help
Whether you a have a question about your course, fees and funding, the application process or anything else, there are plenty of ways you can get in touch, and we'd love to talk to you. You can contact our friendly admissions team by phone, email or chat to us online.
Fees and Funding
Additional Costs
As a student of USW, you’ll have access to lots of free resources to support your study and learning, such as textbooks, publications, online journals, laptops, and plenty of remote-access resources. Whilst in most cases these resources are more than sufficient in supporting you with completing your course, additional costs, both obligatory and optional, may be required or requested for the likes of travel, memberships, experience days, stationery, printing, or equipment.
University Quality Assurance
At USW, we regularly review our courses in response to changing patterns of employment and skills demand to ensure we offer learning designed to reflect today’s student needs and tomorrow’s employer demands.
If during a review process course content is significantly changed, we’ll write to inform you and talk you through the changes for the coming year. But whatever the outcome, we aim to equip our students with the skillset and the mindset to succeed whatever tomorrow may bring. Your future, future-proofed.
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Life at USW
Halls are a big part of your student experience and there’s accommodation at all three of our locations. If you don’t want to live near the campus, there are great transport links to keep you connected.
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How to apply
There is an online application process for this course. Please choose the application form for your preferred start date and mode of study (i.e. full-time or part-time).
International admissions
Please see our international admissions advice for further information about how to apply as a prospective international student.
