Find your inspiration. Enrich your education.
The College of Arts and Letters offers myriad opportunities to explore the arts—the many courses, programs, events, and venues on campus provide avenues for creative exploration and intellectual inquiry.
Whether you make the arts central to your studies or a part of your larger liberal arts education, you will gain an increased appreciation for creativity and the power of the arts to enhance careers, communities, and lives.
“Through art, we come to a most profound understanding of what is good, beautiful, and true.”
— Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame President
Academics
Department of Art, Art History and Design
The Department of Art, Art History and Design is multi-disciplinary in nature and offers courses in the studio arts, art history, and design at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Studio courses include ceramics, industrial design, painting, photography, print making, sculpture, and visual communication design.
Department of Film, Television, and Theatre
The department offers three areas of concentration—film, television, and theatre—with curricula integrating creative and practical production courses with the study of history and theory. The department also offers a season of plays to support its theatre curriculum and student artistic development, as well as the annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival.
Department of Music
The Department of Music provides an intensive course of study for music majors, encompassing performance, music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology in collaboration with a professionally accomplished faculty and world-renowned artists in residence. The department also contributes to the broader musical life on campus through course offerings and ensemble opportunities for majors and non-majors alike.
Creative Writing Program
The Creative Writing Program in the Department of English connects students to the energy anddiversity of contemporary writing. Its distinguished faculty helps students find their voices andconnect their own writing to larger issues, including writing and social concerns, digital media andtechnology, global writing and translation, minority and immigrant literatures, and literarypublications and careers.
Sacred Music
The research and teaching program in Sacred Music at Notre Dame is interdisciplinary and ecumenical in nature, with a Roman Catholic core. The program serves to train the entire person, from childhood to advanced graduate study, and features a doctorate of musical arts, a master’s degree in sacred music, undergraduate engagement, the Notre Dame Children’s Choir, and an extensive outreach program with local parishes.
Shakespeare
Shakespeare at Notre Dame has created a center for Shakespearean scholarship, production, educational outreach, and academic research. It integrates undergraduate and graduate coursework and performances, professional and touring productions, the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, visiting guest artists and lecturers, and multimedia library collections—ensuring Notre Dame’s status as the Midwest’s pre-eminent venue for Shakespeare studies.
Alumni in the Arts
Chris Down ’93, SVP & Global Brand GM, Hot Wheels at Mattel, Inc.
Linda Gase ’86, television writer and producer
Paul Appleby ’05, professional opera singer
Campus Art Venues
Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Throughout the Basilica and its museum, you can uncover Notre Dame’s past through artifacts that reveal the history behind both the Catholic Church and the Congregation of Holy Cross.
Crossroads Gallery at the Center for Arts and Culture
This exhibition space in downtown South Bend enables engagement with community organizations and the general public.
Debartolo Performing Arts Center
The DeBartolo Performing Arts Center is a leading presenter of world-class artistic programming—including theatre, cinema, music, and dance. As an academic space, the center enhances the scholarship, teaching, and practice of the performing and cinematic arts. As a community space, the center welcomes more than 100,000 patrons annually, including hundreds of K–12 students in education and related artistic programs.
Snite Museum of Art
The Snite Museum features a dynamic selection of exhibitions, galleries for student creations, thetranquil Notre Dame sculpture park, and a permanent collection of nearly 28,000 worksrepresenting principal cultures and periods of world art history.
Washington Hall
Built in 1881, historic Washington Hall hosts events, meetings, lectures, performances, and rehearsals. Its primary focus is to serve the student clubs and organizations recognized by the Student Activities Office, as the student body’s main venue for extracurricular productions. Washington Hall is also home to NDTV, the student-run TV station.