Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Mission Statement

Emily Carr's mission is to develop informed artists, designers, and media practitioners who can contribute their creative output and research to Canada's economic, knowledge and cultural sectors. A multidisciplinary university, Emily Carr offers an environment where artists, designers, techologists, researchers and educators interact and collaborate on projects and programs which foster a cross-fertilization or transfer of specialist knowledge and practices which contribute to shaping art, design, media and technology.

International Role

At any given time we have up to 30 international exchange students and researchers from all over the world. In recent years, Emily Carr University has attracted outstanding international students from over 50 countries including: Argentina, Australis, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. At Emily Carr, we also have a very active student exchange program, with 68 partnered institutions in 15 countries. These partnerships give our students the opportunity to access other top art and design schools across North America and around the world. The University also regularly hosts visiting international faculty and renowned international artists.

National Role

Emily Carr is one of only four post-secondary art and design institutions in Canada and one of only eight art and design institutions in North American with over 1000 full-time students. Emily Carr is at an extraordinarily dynamic and transformative moment in its institutional history and has embarked on a process of rebuilding the contemporary art and design university—both organizationally and physically—as an adaptive and engaged site for social, cultural, and economic creativity. This process will culminate in the move of all of our operations to a new campus at the Great Northern Way site in the centre of Vancouver in the fall of 2017. Our vision for our new campus, for the continuous redesign of our academic programs, and for our relationships to the local, regional, national and international communities that we serve, is deeply connected to the understanding that art and design institutions can play a uniquely powerful and catalytic role in the development of larger social innovation ecologies. We will be moving to an area of Vancouver that is among the last remaining tracts of undeveloped land in the City. We will be located adjacent to the Centre for Digital Media—a joint program of the four Vancouver Universities (UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, and BCIT)—and we will be part of a new creative cultural and economic district that will include digital media industries, academic programs, established and emerging business incubators, galleries and artist run centres, maker spaces, etc., as well as connections to surrounding urban residential communities, some of which are already defined, and some of which will be part of this process of urban development. It is in this context, working with the City, the Province, our institutional and industry partners, and the many stakeholders in and around the Great Northern Way trust, that we have the opportunity to establish Emily Carr University of Art + Design as a living lab for the development of a social innovation zone in the False Creek Flats neighbourhood adjacent to the Main Street corridor of Vancouver. While this project is in part about the transformation of Emily Carr as a world class leader and innovator in art and design education, our vision is of a “social innovation zone” that extends well beyond the buildings and traditional boundaries of our own institution, and refers instead to this larger urban ecology we are seeking to create across a number of organizations, institutions, and communities in Vancouver.

Main Focus

Our main focus is to develop studio practices at both the undergraduate and graduate level in Art, Media and Design. Within an environment that is professional, practice-oriented, and at the same time rooted in history and critical theory, students are encouraged to develop new and innovative ways of thinking and creating.