After six years as director of the MFA program and forty-three years at MCAD, Tom DeBiaso is retiring from his position at the helm of the program. Writer Rita Kovtun chronicles Tom's accomplishments and contributions to the MCAD MFA program in her article for NEXT magazine. A portion of the article is shared below. DeBiaso is a true believer in the value of a master of fine arts degree. “As creative practice becomes ever more rich with opportunity, in turn comes a demand for greater and greater expertise. This degree takes students out into the world in a meaningful way, so that it provides them with training in conceptual development, with professional networking and credentials so that they can teach, and confidence that they didn’t have before that’s grounded in the practice of art and design,” he says. And the program turns out successful alumni who continue to work in their fields, whether that be independently as visual artists and designers, for outside agencies and companies that engage their work, or as full-time teachers. DeBiaso says he sees students continuing to work in art and design long after they graduate. “I’m really proud. There’s an incredibly high number of alumni that I connect with that continue their practice and are very happy with their experience with graduate school, and they wouldn’t be happy if they didn’t feel like it took them someplace. The purposeful education is built into what we do,” he says. The full article by Rita Kovtun can be found on the MCAD website. This story originally appears in NEXT, the magazine of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Categories All