Live Art Forms, M.A.
Live Art Forms is a newly created postgraduate master's program teaching performative and aesthetic practices across various disciplines and media—within and beyond visual and performing arts.
The program is designed to enable participants to initiate, organize, and present an individual or collaborative artistic practice foregrounding the multidimensional space that digital and technological platforms constitute, moving bodies immersed in networks, and fragmented yet interwoven planetary publics.
The teaching language of the program is English.
Programme facts
| Degree | Master of Arts (M.A.) |
|---|---|
| Duration | 4 semesters, 120 ECTS |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Required German | A1 |
| Required English | C1 |
| Study mode | Full-Time |
| Start | Winter semester |
| Application | Directly to the university, winter semester until 15.06 |
| Admission | Admission restriction (NC): a competition of school grades |
Will I get in
The programme has an admission restriction: the average grade of your certificate, converted to the German scale, decides. The cut-off changes every year — last year's value shows the order of magnitude, not a promise.
How the selection works and how strong the competition is — we go through it against your certificate when we select programmes for you.
Programme selection →About the programme
The courses are structured along three axes — TECHNE, SOMA, and GEOS. These yield the artistic and discursive space in which performative practices position themselves, are immersed, and from which they launch and are made public.
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TECHNE focuses on the use of contemporary technologies and media that support and host performative practices. It situates the artists’ live work in mixed and virtual realities, on a multiplicity of devices, as well as digital platforms. Courses contextualize students’ work by means of theoretical and artistic texts, writing practices, scoring and coding in human and machine languages.
SOMA places the body as a system at the center of artistic work and teaches expanded dramaturgies, movement- and body-based practices, choreography, embodied concepts and incorporated communal, infrastructural and planetary metabolisms.
GEOS supports the individual mapping of the threads of students’ practices — understood as navigating a path from one position to the next, from one instance of making-public to the other. These pathways are taught as a sequence of positions across disciplines, media and genres by negotiating the complex and multiplying vector space of contemporary aesthetic practice.
The program features a uniquely structured course load with phases of intense, concentrated learning to accommodate students’ work both within and beyond the studios and stages of the academy. The course structure consists of a total of four one-month-long teaching phases in the fall, winter, spring and summer over the academic year. These phases require students’ presence on campus at the Fine Arts Academy in Nuremberg. They alternate with longer phases of more independent off-campus study, in which teaching is organized via digital platforms, facilitating regular exchange between mentors and students on their projects’ development. The campus-centered yet essentially low-residency character of the program allows participants to maintain their already established networks and pursue their individual projects independently in a global context.
A group of visiting professors and mentors from within and outside the academy ensure a multiplicity of worldviews, contexts, identities, and practices across disciplines and media to relate to students’ artistic work. As students themselves are involved in the process of proposing and choosing new mentors and visiting professors, their specific practice-oriented interests are addressed uniquely.
What you study
The Live Art Forms Performative Practices Master Program situates artistic work as acts of making public, digital launches and releases as well as any shape of performative practice in a multidimensional space structured along three axes — TECHNE, SOMA and GEOS.
The full curriculum and the programme's parameters are part of programme selection: we compare them with your profile.
Pick programmesRequirements and application
| Previous education | A first professional university degree at least at Bachelor level acquired in an artistic or design course, especially in the visual or performing arts, with a standard period of study of at least six semesters at a university, art college, college of drama, music or film, technical college, university of applied sciences or equivalent institution of higher education, or a course of study in the humanities, social sciences, political science, or natural sciences, with a standard period of study of at least eight semesters at a university, technical college, or equivalent institution of higher education, |
|---|---|
| Language | German A1, English C1 — confirmed by a certificate when you apply |
| Application | Directly to the university, winter semester until 15.06 |
The procedure and the set of documents depend on your certificate. We check the university's requirements against your documents and give you a list: what to submit, how to certify and translate it, where and when to apply.
Check the requirementsHow to get into this programme
- 1Check your certificate and its recognitionDirect admission, a year at a university at home, or Studienkolleg first — this decides the whole plan.
- 2German up to A1 and a certificateDSH or TestDaF has to be passed before you apply.
- 3Documents and translationsCertified translations of the certificate and transcript, an APS if required. 3–4 weeks.
- 4Application directly to the university until 15.06Send the documents well before the deadline — an incomplete application cannot be completed after it.
- 5Admission, visa, movingPlan 2–3 months for the visa and the blocked account in parallel.
How to apply
You can submit the application yourself or with our help — the university decides on admission in both cases.
Applications go through the university's portal or uni-assist. Typical mistakes:
- ×incorrectly made certified copies and translations
- ×a wrong set of documents
- ×the application submitted the wrong way
- ×errors or gaps in the application form
- ×the application submitted at the wrong time — too early or too late
An incomplete or incorrectly prepared application is excluded from the selection — it can no longer be corrected after the deadline.
StudyInFocus does not represent the university and does not influence the admission decision. We do not sell study places and do not guarantee admission — this is a service for preparing and submitting documents on the applicant's side.
If your level is not enough yet
The two most common stoppers are a language level below the requirement and a certificate without direct admission. Both can be solved, but they take months — plan them now, not after a rejection.
Questions about this programme
What language level do I need?
When do I need to apply?
Don't postpone the application
The deadline is 15.06.2027 (244 days left). Language, translations and the document check take months, not weeks. In 30 minutes we will build a plan backwards from the deadline and tell you honestly whether you can make it.