Undergraduate Admissions: Art

In addition to the university’s general requirements, B.F.A. applicants are required to submit an online portfolio via Cornell AAP SlideRoom. If you have difficulty uploading your portfolio, please contact aap-admissions@cornell.edu. Please consider the following as you prepare and submit your materials.

The Art Department at Cornell views our students as both artists and scholars. Students in the B.F.A. program develop a creative practice informed by a wide array of courses across the university’s many different areas of study. 

The visual arts evolve through the fusion of form and content and are shaped by a multitude of different traditions and lived experiences. The department seeks to build a community that reflects the dynamism of our society, and a place where students and faculty engage in processes of creative investigation, imagination, and actualization.

In our prospective students, we look for: 

• Form: A visual language informed by who you are
• Content: A creative voice informed by your ideas and experiences
• Rigor: A strong resonance between form and content informed by critical thought
• Drive: Initiative, proactivity, and creative problem-solving
• Empathy: How you connect to the world through your voice
• Passion: You create because you care about artmaking

Portfolio Submission Deadlines

Applicants to the B.F.A. program must submit a portfolio as part of their application.

Applicants are responsible for creating SlideRoom accounts and submitting their portfolios through Cornell AAP SlideRoom by the deadlines below. Please note that the deadlines for portfolio submission are earlier than the deadlines for the CommonApp submission. The deadlines for portfolio submissions are:

• Early decision first-year applicants: November 1 
• Regular decision first-year applicants: January 2
• Fall transfer applicants: March 1

We will not accept any portfolios submitted after these deadlines. Find step-by-step instructions on the Cornell AAP SlideRoom website.

AAP Admissions does not accept portfolio submissions by means other than SlideRoom. If you have trouble uploading your portfolio, please email aap-admissions@cornell.edu for help. You may also email SlideRoom technical support at support@slideroom.com.

Portfolio Requirements

What to include in your portfolio:

• High-quality images of a minimum of ten pieces of your artwork.
• One image must be a self-portrait. (You can use any material.)
• One image must explore the idea of time. (This can be shown through how you made the piece or what it’s about.)

What kind of art should you include?

You can choose any type of media (materials), but it’s a good idea to show a variety. This can include:

• Drawing
• Digital media
• Painting
• Photography
• Print media
• Sculpture or installation

Include work that shows your best creative ideas and your strongest technical skills.

It helps to show both:

• Art made in school, and
• Art made on your own.

Your portfolio should reflect who you are as an artist right now.

Additional portfolio guidelines:

• Cropped images will not be accepted. Please show the work in its entirety for your documentation.
• Do not submit a description of your work within the image you upload of your work. Save the image description for the description field in SlideRoom.
• We recommend image descriptions be no more than 50 words.
• Do not submit multiple-angle shots of artwork in one image file or close-up shots.
• Do not outsource your portfolio to a third party. This includes AI-generated images.
• Please ensure that each project is uploaded as its own slide; do not include two different pieces of artwork on one slide.
• You may use more than one slide to showcase a single project if you feel doing so is necessary to give a complete understanding of your work.

File types you can upload:

• Images: JPG, PNG, GIF
• Videos: MOV, WMV, FLV, MP4