Liberal Arts and Sciences

Our Liberal Arts and Sciences curriculum supports and expands your art and design training at Otis College.

We build your experience around four themes: Connecting to creativity, arguing for humanity, math and science in action, and resourcing the future. Through courses that emphasize critical thinking in writing, visual literacy, the sciences, and art history, you’ll cultivate an understanding of context and culture.

Thinking critically, creatively, and expansively is at the heart of the Liberal Arts and Sciences departmental mission. Our goal is to create spaces where students can take a journey from their personal understanding of creativity, develop tools, and make connections to the ways of thinking, knowing, and understanding that are happening globally. As one of the most geographically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse art and design colleges in the United States, we are well situated to take students on this journey. Although Liberal Arts and Sciences is not a degree-conferring department, our courses augment the skills-based education students receive in studio courses through an exploration of the ideas, theories, and worldviews that inform those practices.

We accomplish this through our disciplinary pillars: art history, English, social sciences, and math and natural sciences. These courses provide opportunities for discovery that are essential to the development of students’ creative sensibilities, professional vision, and intellectual aptitude. The combination of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Studio courses grounds students’ educational experiences from Foundation year through their senior capstones and final studio projects.

Students talking in classroom at Otis College

Connecting to Creativity

We never forget that Otis students are designers and artists. Whatever the topic at hand, courses explore specific connections between creative practice and the needs of our world

Teacher talking with students in classroom

Arguing for Humanity

Critical thinking and intellectual rigor are brought to bear as students learn to reason, communicate, and ask challenging questions about our society, past, present, and future.

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Math and Science in Action

Courses in math, cognition, ergonomics, and more are tailored to the needs of artists and designers. We equip students with essential, directly applicable skills to flourish in the industries of the future.

Students in critique during art class at Otis College

Resourcing the Future

We prepare students to become lifelong learners and encourage them to think about how they can use their passion, art, and design skills to address pressing challenges.

Addressing Local and Global Perspectives

The Liberal Arts and Sciences department continually works to expand our representation of diverse cultures. In addition to introducing the Western canon, the department’s courses will also encourage discussion about today’s pressing topics.

An important aspect of your educational development is the exploration of challenging societal issues such as structural racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism, and transphobia. We believe that such engagement will not only be crucial to your career as an artist or designer; it will also give you an important conceptual framework for understanding the world you have inherited and how you might affect change.

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The Liberal Arts and Sciences are the nexus of all education, providing us with the tools to understand the past, negotiate the present, and create the future. Without them we are lost; with them we can reimagine anything."

Departmental Mission Statement

Essential Toolbox

See what our alumni and faculty have to say about the value of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and how we enhance students’ abilities to read, question, research, rethink, speculate, argue, connect, understand, write, create, and inspire.