Columbus College of Art & Design

Certainly one of the oldest, Columbus College of Art & Design is based in Columbus, Ohio, and offers 10 undergraduate courses such as illustration, graphic design, industrial design, interior design and fine arts.

Founded as Columbus Art School in 1879, guests within its first three years included First Lady Lucy Hayes and Oscar Wilde, who delivered a public lecture at the college. CCAD has gone by its current name since 1959.

It boasts remarkably low student-staff ratios. In 2010, students enrolled in its first ever postgraduate course, a master of fine arts. In 2016, it introduced a second: a master of design in integrated design.

CCAD is well-located in an art-loving city where the graphic art scene is particularly eye-catching, as are nationally-acclaimed Columbus Museum of Art and Pizzuti Collection. Columbus is also one of the most important US cities for fashion. Home to a sparkling waterfront, a growing LGBT+ community and an increasing number of microbreweries, it has a young population also made up of the many students from Ohio State University, one of the largest higher education institutions in the country.

Columbus is 110 miles north east of Cincinnati and 140 miles south west of Cleveland, the state’s most populous city. CCAD’s 100-foot sculpture, installed in 2001, is one of the city’s landmarks.

Alumni include Nathan Greno, who directed the film Tangled after working as a Walt Disney Animation Studios story artist on Frozen, Mulan and Chicken Little, and Roy Doty, an award-winning cartoonist who was also illustrator for several Judy Blume books.