Join our radical learning community and experience transformative learning for yourself in stunning surroundings!
The Arts School is a new faculty of Dartington Trust, a centre for learning, arts, ecology and social justice based on a 1,200 acre estate near Totnes.
Students will join an incredible community of current students, staff and alumni, and experience for themselves the leading-edge models of progressive learning in the arts and ecology at Dartington.
ABOUT US: Read more about our history and ethos >
study with us
Find out what it’s like to study at Dartington, and explore our programmes
flexible learning models
We offer pathways to learning to suit all needs – including part time routes, ‘build-your-own’ modules, and blended learning
postgraduate programmes
Reimagining Performance Practice
Reimagining Performance Practice is an integrative, transdisciplinary programme for performers, and anyone working in the field of performance, who are determined to reimagine performance and performative public engagement for the coming decades.
Poetics of Imagination
Explore story and culture, examining how we have conjured stories from the earliest times to the present day. The course is centred around oral telling and opens to a broader spectrum of arts, examining the work of ancient to contemporary storytellers, writers and artists.
Cultural Production
What does it really mean to create, curate and manage cultural organisations and arts projects? This programme is designed to help you build and enhance your production, managerial, administrative, fundraising and creative curatorial skills, to survive in the contemporary arts sector.
Arts and Ecology
This is the most decisive decade in human history and unlike previous highly significant periods in history, we are fully aware of how pivotal these few years are to our species and the planet as human habitat. Arts and Ecology is a low residency master’s degree that asks how the whole of our humanity can be brought to this urgent conversation.
Arts and Place
Open to practitioners and curators working in any art form including performance, writing, soundart, moving image, photography, digital art and fine art, this course puts particular emphasis on collaborative practice in response to an expanded understanding of place, via a unique residency-based programme.
research at dartington
We offer research degrees in partnership with University of Westminster CREAM. Our researchers have expertise in a wide range of topics including arts practice-led research; animism; medieval literature; modernism; story and myth; arts, design and ecology; ecology and spirituality; Goethean science; regenerative economics, farming and food; social work with adults and children; and social enterprise.
why join us?
our venue
Dartington has a range of dance, theatre, music and art studios and a wealth of outdoor learning spaces including woods, farmland, the river Dart, the medieval deer park, food growing and landscaped gardens.
our faculty
Dartington Arts School has a rich interdisciplinary learning community of staff and students working with a passion to be change-agents for a sustainable future.
our programmes
Our low residency, innovative programmes offer you a learning experience rich in intellectual and creative exploration, with a flexibility that suits the complexities of modern life.
latest news & blogs
Alice Oswald joins Dartington Arts School as senior lecturer
We are delighted to be able to share with you that poet Alice Oswald is joining the teaching staff at Dartington Arts School as a senior lecturer on the Poetics of Imagination MA.
Growing the Growers at Dartington
Explore our new online exhibition – part of the Leonardo LASER Garden at the international Ars Electronica Festival, taking place online 8-12 September.
Finding a different way home
As part of a series of posts on performance artists, Tracey Warr is in conversation with Misha Myers – previously a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts.
follow us
Great to see contemporary sculpture on the estate. Art trails for Ferment festival start tomorrow night!
Artwork = Source of energy by Alexandra Dementieva, a synopsis light sculpture with living entity, 2021
@cyland.lab #ferment #dartington #sculpture #kombuchabrewing #sculpturegarden
As part of our Arts and Ecology programme we're delighted to be welcoming artists from the Cyland MediaArt Lab to Dartington for art installations in and around the main courtyard. The free art trail and workshops are open to all and will feature experimental soundart exploring the subjectivization of sound, as well as a host of other audio and video works. The full programme is available via the What’s On link in our bio.
#ferment #cyfest #dartington #artinstallation #festival #artsfestival
🥁 Well this was fun! Our Taiko Drumming short course participants were making some big noise down in Studio 1 at the weekend. Thanks Lucy Thomas for a great 48 hours.
Photo credit: Lucy Thomas, Kagemusha Taiko
Next up in this strand of our short course programme is our Balinese Gamelan Dance weekend 2-3 October. Last few spaces remaining!
#drumming #taiko #taikodrums #dartington #shortcourse #worldmusic #percussion #drums #drummer
Prizewinning artist Fhiona McKie studied Art and Design at Dartington back in the late 70s and early 80s, and in our latest podcast talks about the innovation and experimentalism she experienced there at the time. She returns next month to teach a short course on Sensory Drawing Journeys - a drawing course for people of all levels - taking place over the first weekend of October in which she hopes to help participants find playfulness and spontaneity as they develop their practice amid the beautiful surroundings of the estate.
Listen to the full podcast here via the podcast link in our bio.
Book for the course using the Whats On link and searching for Sensory Drawing Journeys.