Master of Fine Arts University of Fine Arts Hamburg

HFBK Hamburg offers the Master of Fine Arts programme, which focuses on student-driven artistic and/or scholarly development projects. In this programme, research questions, working methods, and creative processes are critically reflected upon, deepened, and refined.

Students are provided with workspaces and receive intensive supervision from faculty through individual and group consultations. The academic curriculum sharpens their critical reflection regarding their own research questions, methods, and processes, while also supporting further research projects. Through exhibition projects and events both within and beyond the university context, students develop a professional approach to presentation formats and distribution methods.

Upon completion of the programme, students present their artistic and/or scholarly work to a broader public, accompanied by documentation in a publication. They deepen and refine their artistic and/or scholarly competencies, creating work whose experimental character generates aesthetic arguments, statements, and intensities. Students learn to purposefully employ technical methods to express, refine, and further develop their artistic ideas.

They acquire extensive art-historical knowledge and theoretical concepts that enable reflection on the status of their own work and serve to inspire and intensify their artistic productivity. Students with a scholarly focus are capable of formulating theoretical problems in a nuanced manner, developing them argumentatively, and deriving theses or conclusions.

The standard period of study is four semesters, culminating in the degree Master of Fine Arts (MFA).

Each year, the application period starts at the beginning of February and ends at the beginning of March.

Students are entitled to study the Master’s degree programme in Fine Arts (Master of Fine Arts) at HFBK Hamburg if they can demonstrate an independent artistic position in an entrance examination in accordance with Section 39 (3) of the Hamburg Higher Education Act and have a university degree (including degrees from a university of applied sciences) of 240 ECTS points.

The entrance examination committee decides on the basis of the work submitted whether an independent artistic position exists.

Applicants who do not yet have a university degree at the time of the application deadline, but will obtain one in the six months following the application deadline, may apply and must provide proof of their university degree by the start of the programme at the latest.

Applicants whose university degree comprises fewer than 240 ECTS credits (e.g. 180 ECTS credits in the case of a three-year Bachelor’s degree) are still encouraged to apply and are asked to submit evidence of at least one year of artistic practice, activities in the field of cultural and artistic institutions, internships or previous studies. Outstanding artistic achievements can also be recognised by the admissions committee amounting to 60 ECTS.

Proof of German language skills is not required. However, we strongly recommend that you have knowledge of German in order to be able to take full advantage of the courses on offer (seminars, lectures, group and individual discussions, workshops and more).

Summer semester 2026: 371 EUR

https://hfbk-hamburg.de/en/information/funding-opportunities/scholarships

https://hfbk-hamburg.de/en/information/professionalization