The Leiden Academic Course Center offers a large variety of visual art courses. Our courses are offered for beginners as wel as more advanced students. In the lessons everybody will be guided according to their experience. All the art supplies used during the classes are included in the price of the…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

Practicum Artium (PA) is a programme specially developed for students of Leiden University with a talent for visual arts and an interest in artistic research. Art and research feed on one another and are intertwined in many ways. In Practicum Artium, you will explore artistic practices and methods,…

Subproject of

In what ways can visual art play a vital role in countering the discriminating stigma experienced by transgender communities?

The Secret Life of Art Works. Exploring the Boundaries between Art and Life is the first collection of essays to present case studies from the visual arts, architecture, sculpture and numismatics, and to engage critically with theoretical perspectives from art history, psychology, aesthetics and ant…

This dissertation focuses on a new field of artistic research in which a visual artist takes on the role of researcher. The main research question is whether performance art integrated in an ecumenical service, combined with artistic directions from the artist, can enhance the religious experience of…

Bruno Munari (1907–1998) was a prolific and influential artist, designer, and writer. Alessandro Colizzi’s study is the first extensive, detailed record of Munari’s graphic design production, and as such provides a substantial base for a full understanding of his oeuvre.

Visual art played an important role in the development of cooperative human behaviour. This is the finding of Larissa Mendoza Straffon, a PhD candidate in archaeology, whose dissertation explores the biological and psychological foundations of visual art.

The subject of the research is ‘difference and repetition’, an area which bears a direct relationship to Wjm Kok’s practice, in which the production of work always emerges and passes through series.

Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand…

On 14 December 2022, students of the course Social and Ecological Activism in the Visual Arts (as part of the Creative Strategies for a Society in Change minor) presented and performed their final collective project at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht: the Water Cultures Institute group role-playing…

Application deadline: October 1, 2021

PhD programme PhDArts is looking for new applicants!

The master’s programme in Arts and Culture at Leiden University is uniquely positioned at the intersection of Art History and Museum Studies. Informed by leading interdisciplinary research, this degree provides you with a strong academic foundation for a variety of careers in museums, galleries and…

Visual art today is strongly interlinked with today’s society, a connection which is reinforced and deepened by social and other media. In Arts, Media and Society, a specialisation of our Art History bachelor's programme, you will explore this relationship and analyse how it reflects and impacts the…

The purpose of LENS is to foster, coordinate and support research of visual media of analog and digital photography, film, and video, and the visual arts.

At ACPA, the collaboration between Leiden University and the University of the Arts The Hague, artistry and academia meet at the highest level.

This study links up the concept of place with memory, with the idea of transience and the transition from life to death.

This doctoral research project in design seeks to shed a light on legibility in the context of visually impaired beginning readers.

Promotor: J.N. Kok, Co-promotor: M.S. Lew

How would you like to combine your studies at Leiden University with high-level education in the arts? The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts will give you a unique opportunity to develop your academic and artistic talents.

Exploring cultural production in Europe, Latin America and Africa, the institute’s research programme focuses on the continuous interconnectedness of the Arts and Society in both the textual culture of literature, learning and public debate and the visual culture of art, architecture, film, photography…

Are you eager to explore traditional and experimental audiovisual methods for ethnographic research? Do you consider translating your research findings into a documentary? Are you highly motivated, committed and hard working? Then Visual Ethnography is the right specialisation for you! Visual Ethnography…

Anyone who creates a page for a magazine, a PowerPoint presentation, a brochure, a poster or dreams up an idea for an infographic is faced with important questions:

This research hopes to contribute to social awareness of the consequences of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples, to the deconstruction of still existing colonial and discriminatory notions and to a better appreciation of Indigenous art and thought.

Wouter Eekhout, our data magician, came in 3d place in the ‪#‎LinksSDGs‬ - Natural language processing and data visualization challenge.

With the dramatic growth of the image data on the web, there is an increasing demand of the algorithms capable of understanding the visual information automatically.

This study aims to make a practical contribution to a new understanding and use of 3D reconstructions, namely as ‘laboratories’ to test hypotheses and visualize, evaluate and discuss alternative interpretations.

Vitamin A or retinol is essential in embryonic development, the visual cycle and the immune system.

Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio tells a compelling story about Central America's drug war through a series of rich photographs. The book, which is entirely bilingual in English and Spanish, focuses on Guatemala, which has become the primary point of transit for cocaine produced in the Andes and…

The Platform for Arts Research in Collaboration (PARC) is a new online and offline platform for researchers working in and beyond the fields of Composition, Music, Art and Design to exchange knowledge, experiences and public events, stimulate collaboration and increase the visibility of their research…

The Leiden Lectures in Media | Art | Politics (MAP) is a series of talks organized by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. Speakers from various academic backgrounds and in different stages of their careers reflect on diverging ways in which technological and social changes challenge and transform…

The deeper understanding of an organism's pathology is important for developing treatments. Over centuries of systematic research, clinical researchers have demonstrated that the more information they acquire about the cellular properties and their organisation in the tissue, the better they can understand…

The available tools for academic literature search return a list of ranked documents, which might not be ideal for some tasks. To facilitate these tasks, I am creating a visual representation of the academic search space where the user can browse academic topics.

Special Issue in: Visual Anthropology, Volume 29, Issue 3, 2016

Investigation of 1.) The whereabouts of the epistemological dissonances in art criticisms on Post-war contemporary art from Japan between two different language realms, in this case in English and Japanese; and 2.) What the dissonances disclose, disturb, and contribute in the process of the establishment…

PhD candidate Lilo Nein investigates relations between texts and performances from the perspective of visual art.

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.

Larissa Mendoza Straffon and colleagues investigated visual attentional biases toward self-made artworks, which tend to be favoured, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. Their findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made…

The recent rise in global migration movements and the simultaneous attempts to prevent migrations to the Global North in general and Europe in particular have produced numerous images and narratives that try to record and convey these events and their actors.

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

PhDArts candidate Ruchama Noorda will graduate on Wednesday 9 December 2015

How can the concept of Critical Making be expanded into a general approach that ties the critical methodology of artistic research, and the established concepts of artistic autonomy, together with contemporary creative-technological development?

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.