Curriculum

The curriculum of the Missouri Fine Arts Academy is divided into three distinct categories of study:

1. Interdisciplinary Artistic Studies
2. Discipline-specific Artistic Studies
3. Elective Classes

1. Interdisciplinary Artistic Studies

The Interdisciplinary (ID) course at Missouri Fine Arts Academy

• Is facilitated by a team of teachers from different artistic disciplines
• Is composed of a student group, including artists from various disciplines, that stay together throughout the duration of the class
• Revolves around a broad theme that embraces all of the following disciplines: vocal music, instrumental music, visual arts, theatre, and dance
• Provides all students with active participation experiences in each of these disciplines, facilitated by peers and by teachers with artistic expertise
• Allows student to shape, in great measure, the course experiences
• Recognizes the facilitators have valuable experience, insights, knowledge, and talents
• Includes a concept-based interdisciplinary presentation that encompasses student participation in all the fine arts areas and addresses the broad theme
• Culminates in an evaluation session that includes evaluation of the presentations themselves, group processes, and student learning

Each student will spend every class day morning working in an innovative course of an interdisciplinary nature.

Each interdisciplinary group is composed of about 25 students, including vocalists, instrumentalists, visual artists, dancers, and actors. Each group experience is facilitated by two faculty members with specialties in different artistic disciplines. Students and facilitators in each group work collaboratively to explore a single broad theme. The process of exploration naturally involves students’ participation in experiences that meet Missouri’s performance standards for students in its schools

• Gather, analyze and apply information and ideas
• Communicate effectively within and beyond the classroom
• Recognize and solve problems
• Make decision and act as responsible members of society

Each of the five interdisciplinary groups creates a unique presentation that illustrates the Academy theme and that incorporates all the artistic disciplines represented at the Academy. These presentations are shared with the rest of the Academy community. A reflection and evaluation session follows the presentations.

Course Objectives (.doc, 39K)
Rationale, Plan and Strategies (.doc, 46K)

Course Descriptions

Acting through the Lens: A Self-Tape Film Acting Workshop

Instructor: Laine Cordell

Young artists will explore how to give a strong audition on film, how to market themselves as a well-rounded professional, how to build a résumé, understand typecasting, and focus on the fundamentals of film acting, screen tests, vocal music auditions and understanding the new wave of the industry in self-taping.

Ama-ZINE: Collaborative Art & Writing

Instructor: Meganne Rosen

In this interdisciplinary course, art and writing students team up to create a collaborative zine that amplifies their unique voices through visual storytelling and creative writing. Students will explore the art of zine-making, from concept development and page design to writing, illustration, and layout. Through workshops and critiques, they will experiment with mixed media, comics, poetry, essays, and more. The course culminates in a printed and digital zine that showcases their collective creativity, emphasizing collaboration, self-expression, and DIY publishing culture.

Art as Equity

Instructor: Tanner Munson

Historically, art has been a critical foundation of the history of protest and struggle to achieve equity in the United States and across the globe. Whether music, poems, paintings or other forms of creative expression, art has been at the core of efforts to express emotion, communicate difficult concepts, spur action and change what seems impossible. Art has been particularly important in illustrating and helping to facilitate how people understand what racism is, how it feels to experience privilege or oppression and exploring the implications of policies and practices that affect us indirectly or directly. This course includes several arts-based examples to illustrate how art can facilitate insights, observations and strategies to address inequalities in our world.

Clay Percussion

Instructor: Kevin Hughes

This course would involve students creating udo drums out of clay that they make while simultaneously developing a performance based on percussion and dance that would celebrate diversity, inclusion, and community. This original performance will be performed at the showcase.

Creating for a Better World: Art as Equity

Instructor: Rick Briggenhorst 

Historically, art has played a critical role in protest movements and the fight to achieve equity in the United States and globally. Whether through music, poems, paintings or other forms of creative expression, art has been at the core of efforts to express emotion, communicate difficult concepts, ignite action, and change what seems impossible. Art has been particularly important in illustrating how it feels to experience privilege or oppression and exploring the implications of policies and practices that affect us indirectly or directly. In this course, we delve into several arts-based examples that demonstrate how art provides insights, observations, and offers strategies to address inequalities in our world and begin to shape change. “Creating for a Better World: Art as Equity” empowers students to recognize the impact they and their creativity can have on the world around them. By collaborating across disciplines, students will develop a project that impacts positive change in their MFAA experience or beyond. The ending result could be an immersive experience, performance, zine, video, etc.

Expanding Our Experience

Instructor: Erin Tyler

This student-centered course invites participants to broaden their understanding of art through interdisciplinary exploration and reflective making practices. Activities such as deep listening, automatic drawing, oblique strategies, and group improvisation will foster curiosity and provide new approaches to creativity. We will examine contemporary artworks that challenge traditional boundaries, sparking group discussions on how art can question norms, evoke emotions, and tell powerful stories. Through collaborative synthesis of their experiences, students will work together to create a final project that integrates multiple artistic disciplines, pushing the limits of creative expression while reflecting on their personal and collective journey.

Holding Space

Instructor: Dr. Heather Nelson

Artists in this course will examine how we inhabit, move through, utilize, hear, and eliminate space in various ways through art. We will examine how reducing or expanding space changes how we interact with each other and with art, and how different artists use space to draw our attention to certain details of works in music, visual art, literature, and drama.

Interdisciplinary Music 1

Instructor: Jacob Hiser

Form tends to be thought of as one of the more abstract elements of making art. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s the container that focuses and directs creative ideas, giving a distinct shape to an artistic work, yet it’s often the least discussed (especially pre-college). Without form, art, like language, is gibberish. Form gives meaning to what we have to say. We’ll study concrete ways of dealing with form, observing and participating in traditional formal structures throughout history, exploring how they can direct movement, sound, visual art, and writing. We’ll generate our own formal structures that suit our own artistic interests, playing with varying levels of freedom and control within those structures. Finally, we’ll collaboratively create a work that incorporates the concepts we’ve studied and the unique discoveries we’ve made over the course of the academy.

Interdisciplinary Music 2

Instructor: Dr. Jason Hausback

This course covers the basic elements of a music theatre production and some background in how to create a short musical, including structure, storyline, acting, and integrating music (both original and using pre-existing recordings) to create and stage an original production by the end of the academy. 

Interviews and Art

Instructor: Gemma Campanini

Students will emerge from this course with a variety of creative works responding to the told stories of their peers. In addition, students will gain interview skills, both on the interview and interviewee side. This class facilitates the integration of effective communication with artistic response through empathy-building and introspective collaborative practice.  First, students will pair up with a partner. Students will create powerful interview scripts designed to get to know the classmate and understand the artist: what motivates and drives their peer’s art, what goals their peers have for their artmaking, and so on; the students will practice effective notetaking to capture beautiful stories from the interviews. Once each student has both interviewed and been interviewed, they will work collaboratively to create first a poem in response to their peer, as well as a performance in another discipline. Finally, once the responding art pieces have been crafted, groups will merge as a class during the final class period to demonstrate their work to gain class feedback and grow collectively as artists.

Making a Museum

Instructor: Shaylin Montgomery

In this class, students will study existing museum experiences before creating several museum experiences of their own. What form these experiences will take will be decided by the students, but each experience will reflect the Academy’s theme of transformation. Like most museum experiences, the ones designed here will be visual, verbal, auditory, and much more; in this way, each of the fine arts will be addressed and honored by all students.

Musical Theatre

Instructor: Michael Butcher

Students from all disciplines learn how musical theatre is constructed, created, and performed. Students will create an original musical performance and perform it at the showcase.

Theft by Finding

Instructor: Dr. Perry Mears

In this course, we will explore the ways artists throughout history have borrowed, copied, and outright stolen the creative ideas of others. We will practice imitating various styles of visual, musical, and verbal composition, discussing how such imitation may help students find their own artistic voices. We will investigate the ethics of “borrowing” in the creation of works of art, particularly as it relates to AI.

2. Discipline-Specific Artistic Studies

Each student is placed in a class focusing on the discipline in which they were accepted to the Academy:

• Creative Writing
• Theatre Studies
• Instrumental Music
• Visual Arts
• Vocal Music

Course Descriptions

Creative Writing

Free Verse Universe

Instructor: Gemma Campanini

This course will enable students to analyze, write, prepare, and ultimately perform original free-verse poetry through an array of collaborative activities, group discussions, and individual writing prompts. After studying the foundational concepts of written-style verse, students will be empowered to develop writing and delivery styles that draw upon their unique voices and talents to create powerful performative works.

Storytelling with Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat!"

Instructor: Shaylin Montgomery

In 2005, Blake Snyder took the writing world by storm with the publication of a book entitled "Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need." This book offered tips for writing great stories using a formula that was flexible enough to accommodate whatever wild adventures authors could imagine but structured enough to ward off that ever-present evil: Writer’s Block. Over the years, the principles outlined in Snyder’s text have been applied to a variety of storytelling mediums—from film to TV to novels, and so much more! In this class, student writers will learn about "Save the Cat!" storytelling as they write "Save the Cat!" stories of their own. (NOTE: Writers of all genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more—can benefit from an understanding of this process.)

Music - Instrumental

Eyes and Ears: Hearing What You See, Seeing What You Hear

Instructor: Dr. Perry Mears

Instrumental Music with Dr. Hausback

Instructor: Dr. Jason Hausback

Topics in this course include the building blocks of music, learning how to analyze music, music performance coaching, an exploration of modern performance techniques/compositional styles, and presenting a group performance at the end of the Academy.

Instrumental Music with Mr. Hiser

Instructor: Jacob Hiser

Topics in this course include the building blocks of music, learning how to analyze music, music performance coaching, an exploration of modern performance techniques/compositional styles, and presenting a group performance at the end of the Academy.

Music - Vocal

Not Quite Karaoke

Instructor: Tanner Munson

An in-depth look at contemporary commercial music and the vocal training required to perform this style of music successfully. Students will engage in a variety of activities including: the preparation of a solo piece, resources available for high-quality arrangements of popular songs, tools to transpose tracks into keys appropriate for their range, and technical exercises to assist with healthy vocal development. Students are encouraged to arrive with a song they feel best shows off their abilities.

The Living Instrument: Singing as a Whole Person

Instructor: Dr. Heather Nelson

In this course, we'll explore how singing is a whole self-activity, involving the brain, the body, the emotions, and our own personal histories in deep ways. We'll explore vocal health, practice techniques, mindfulness, among other things, and how to integrate these things into our life on the stage. Our focus will be both working on our voices in the present moment and singing for life. Students should come with three songs in various stages of preparation: one song performance ready, one song that is well-learned but needs some polishing, and one song in the beginning stages of learning.

Theatre Studies

Character Development

Instructor: Laine Cordell

Exploring Acting Techniques

Instructor: Michael Butcher

The main goal of this course is to explore various acting techniques in theatre. Students will be actively engaged in a variety of acting techniques and strategies.

Visual Arts

Abstract Exploration: Painting and Mixed Media

Instructor: Meganne Rosen

Drawing from the Natural World

Instructor: Erin Tyler with guest lecturer Meganne Rosen

Wabi-Sabi and Clay: Exploring an Aesthetic of Uniqueness in Clay and Life

Instructor: Kevin Hughes

YOU + U (Identity Collage Making)

Instructor: Rick Briggenhorst

— "A" Day Electives —