Department of Visual and Performing Arts

Art gives form to human aspiration, identity, power, and belief. It builds the empathy that holds communities together, drives the movements that change societies, and creates the shared experiences that remind us what we have in common.

The world needs artists and thinkers who can help us understand art, and ourselves, better. In the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, students do three things at once: they develop studio and performance skills, they build the critical and historical frameworks to understand creative work in context, and they connect both to the real challenges of the world they’re entering.

Students contribute to class discussion in the during the Art, the Public, and Worcester’s Cultural Institutions course

Academics

We offer a Bachelor of Arts in Art History; Media, Culture, and the Arts; Music; Screen Studies; Theater Arts, and Visual Arts; with options to minor; including a minor in dance.

Explore

A student in a painting studio seated behind a canvas on an easel.

Student work

Films, paintings, performances, research, photobooks, community projects — see what’s being made right now, how it reaches audiences, and where it takes our students.

See the work

Student tuning a guitar in the photography classroom.

Signature experience

Visual and Performing Arts Capstone

Where four years of creative and critical work come together — in public, in community, and on your own terms.

Explore the capstone

“The interdisciplinary approach to an arts education I received at Clark has helped me consistently work in my field, and has made me competitive with my peers who have attended conservatories.”
Alison Russo ’14

Make. Analyze. Connect.

Make

In studios, rehearsal spaces, recording facilities, editing suites, and on stage, students develop technical mastery across a remarkable range of forms — drawing and painting, digital filmmaking and screenwriting, music composition and performance, theatrical design and playwriting, graphic design, and the curatorial practice of art history.

Analyze

In seminars and research courses, students develop the analytical and historical frameworks that give their practice depth and direction. Art history majors engage the ethical debates reshaping how museums think about meaning, ownership, and value. Screen studies students examine how genre, ideology, and representation operate across a century of moving-image media. Theater students learn to read a script simultaneously as playwright, director, actor, and historian.

Professor Toby Sisson points out a detail of a sculpture to a student at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston.

Connect

Students have documented water scarcity research in Mexico City, written plays performed at the Kennedy Center American Collegiate Theatre Festival, and made films selected for competitive festivals across the United States and internationally. Worcester and Boston put them inside a working creative ecosystem — the Worcester Art Museum, the Hanover Theatre, ArtsWorcester, and Company One are professional partners.

News

Toby Sisson giving a gallery talk for the exhibit Us | Them | We

Faculty mentors

Toby Sisson selected for RISD Museum residency

Her work, spanning drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, oil, encaustic, and mixed media, explores themes at the intersection of history and race in America.

Clark conductor, choir revive the memory and power of Frederick Douglass

Cailin Marcel Manson, director of music performance at Clark, conducted the world premiere of “Frederick: A Cantata on the Life of Frederick Douglass,” featuring a chorus that included the Clark University Choir.
The Embrace Project: Art as a Way of Belonging

Wynne Dromey ‘25 turned an image of her own adoption into a community project — paintings, workshops at a women’s shelter, volunteering, and a capstone that asks what it means to belong.