The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Art

Headline

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Art is an internationally-oriented educational and research institution continuing a more than 250-year-old tradition of developing artistic talent and enterprise to the highest standards, based upon the independent work of each individual student.

Through the years, many leading artists have been trained and nurtured here, from Caspar David Friedrich and Bertel Thorvaldsen through Vilhelm Hammershøi to Olafur Eliasson, Kirstine Roepstorff and Jesper Just.

Today, the Academy’s Fine Arts Schools have around 200 students and 50 employees, of whom 22 are artistic and academic staff. Art teaching is undertaken by a large staff of professors and lecturers with a background in visual art and who are active in the production of exhibitions, many of them internationally-based. They are supplemented by other employees who are highly skilled in a wide range of technical disciplines. In addition, large numbers of artistic and academic guest lecturers from inside and outside Denmark come to give lectures, hold workshops, and to undertake tutorials and studio visits. Their presence, alongside that of an increasing number of students with a non-Danish ethnic background, is helping to secure a constant supply of new knowledge and experience for the institution.

At the Academy’s Fine Arts Schools, the students are involved as much as possible in the organisation of their teaching and, for the duration of their course of study, the personal and academic engagement of students is expected in their practical and academic training. During the first three years, the syllabus and learning program unfold in a relatively restrictive framework, partly in the form of recurrent modules in art history and theory, lecture series and discussion forums. The last three years of the study program are worked out in close co-operation between professor and student and place greater demands on the student’s individual commitment and initiative. 

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