Kyoto University of the Arts

Kyoto University of the Arts opened in 1977 as the Kyoto College of Art, became the Kyoto University of Art and Design in 1991, and took its present name in 2020. Its main campus sits on Mount Uryuyama in Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, with a second base at the Gaien Campus in the outer gardens of Meiji Jingu in Tokyo, opened in 2010, and a graduate school running since 1996.

The university is unusual in Japan for the breadth of what it treats as art: the faculty was reorganised in 2013, after merging with the Kyoto Institute of Design and the Kyoto Institute of Culture and Language, into thirteen departments and twenty-one courses that run from product and spatial design to manga, film, stage arts and cultural heritage. A correspondence faculty has existed since 1998, the Kyoto Art Theater opened on campus in 2001, and the Koyodo Museum was donated to the university in 2005. That mix of craft, design and popular visual culture gives the school a distinct position among Japanese art universities, and its graduates feed into Kyoto’s studios, museums and media industries.