What does an Master of Fine Arts in Screen Scoring & Music Design mean for your next chapter?
Our MFA in Screen Scoring & Music Design is designed to prepare students to pursue a career in the growing field of music for on-screen media, including film, television, video games and interactive entertainment.
The MFA in Screen Scoring & Music Design is a continuous five-quarter program at MDS. Our program functions like a real-world film or game music production company, with defined assignments, deadlines and standards for evaluation, and will provide mentoring and voice-building under the guidance of masters. Benchmark quarters culminate in major recording projects, conducted with ensembles ranging from chamber and post-rock groups to symphony orchestras. The program covers the gamut of screen music crafts so that its graduates are prepared to pursue careers in the industry by a number of different professional avenues.
Learn from World-Class Industry Professionals
In our programs, mentorship is built into the experience. Learn with dedicated guidance from working artists who bring real-world perspective to every step of your path forward.
Andy Hill, Executive Dean, Creative Arts
Andy Hill is a thirty-five year veteran of the film and television music industry. His career includes his tenure as vice-president of music production for Walt Disney Pictures from 1988-97, the period of the Disney Renaissance, during which time he oversaw music for films which earned nine Academy Awards in music categories.
Subsequently, as an independent music supervisor and producer in the Todd- Soundeluxe stable, he received a Grammy Award for Sony’s The Adventures of Elmo In Grouchland. Andy’s move into education in 2006, after twenty years in Hollywood was a natural outgrowth of his passion for identifying, developing and mentoring emerging talent. He founded the world’s first MFA degree program in film scoring at Columbia College Chicago and directed it for five years before accepting a similar role in the launch of the masters program in film and game scoring at Berklee’s new international campus in Valencia, Spain. His next international moves carried him to Belgium, Ireland and, after a stint in Nashville, to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he co-founded and directed the Film Scoring Academy of Europe for six years. All three of Andy’s previous programs have achieved global ranking.
He is also the author of an acclaimed text for media composers, Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Music for Film and Contemporary Media, published initially in 2017 by Hal Leonard and published in its second edition from Bloomsbury Academic in May 2026. Andy will carry out his duties as Executive Dean for Creative Arts at Strayer University from his base in Atlanta, Georgia.
Please note:
This course is exclusively offered in the United States of America, and is not available at Media Design School at Strayer in New Zealand. For more information about the course, please visit the course website at screenscoring.mediadesignschool.com. For any further information on the course, please contact the Media Design School at Strayer US team through the contact form on the website, or by calling 1-833-798-8890