The Comm Arts Program

Now more than ever, it’s important for Asbury University students to be culture-shapers – servants and leaders in our society. They start with the solid foundation that’s been established in generations of Asbury students – excellence in education and spiritual vitality. As they graduate, they are strategically placed to change the messages pouring into our culture, and to influence the people they meet daily within that culture. In this way, their lives serve as windows through which God’s light can shine into one of the world’s most influential industries.

In 1982, our Communication Arts program was founded to answer that call. It began as a minor in Broadcast Communications with nine students, and today it is a flourishing department of more than 300 majors including Communications, Media Communications, Journalism and Theatre and Cinema Performance.

Through the years, our students have had unique opportunities to work and learn.

• Regularly students go to the Los Angeles Film Studies Center for a hands-on experience in Hollywood. In 2006, students and faculty partnered with Bristol Bay Productions and Walden Media to promote the movie Amazing Grace by producing documentaries, promotional trailers and educational resources.

• Since 1984, more than 350 Asbury University students have worked in professional positions at the Summer or Winter Olympic games. Asbury University was the only school outside of the host country invited to send media students to work for pay in Beijing, Torino, Athens, Salt Lake City, Sydney and Atlanta, and will do the same in Vancouver in 2010.

• In Theatre & Cinema Performance, students perform in regular stage productions, as well as staged television sitcoms. Faculty member, Doug Smart, a twenty-two year veteran director of situation comedies for the networks, brings TCP students together with Media students, to shoot the sitcoms in front of a live audience.

• For the past several years, communications students have traveled to New York City to spend time at major PR agencies learning about issues and trends in public relations. They also take on one major project each year, usually providing services for non-profits like Operation Christmas Child and The Hope Center of Lexington.

Opportunities like these, and many unique courses of study, are guided by faculty with a broad range of real-world experience in broadcast and print journalism, film and television production, audio production, media management, multimedia, design and photography. Media students have won more than 300 regional, national and international awards including three student Emmys in the last five years.