Master of Arts in Creative Leadership

MCAD’s Master of Arts in Creative Leadership is an accelerated fifteen-month, online program—bracketed by two week-long residencies in Minneapolis—for individuals who seek the knowledge and skills to navigate changes in their careers, organizations, and communities. With a focus on forward-looking organizational practices, the program cultivates empathic and adaptive leaders who ask bold questions, take educated risks, act with courage, embrace diverse ideas, and collaborate with others around a shared purpose. Whether your background is in non-profits, cultural organizations, corporations, start-ups, government sectors, or other fields, you will learn how to lead more effectively within a dynamic, complex world. The low-residency format provides maximum flexibility and accessibility while emphasizing the importance of building a strong network of peers in each cohort.

Master the management practices and principles of decentralized, collective, and adaptive organizations and teams. Learn the skills of conscious communication and conflict resolution, following standards for cultural sensitivity in interpersonal interactions. Be equipped to think, communicate, and act in an imaginative way, characterized by a high degree of risk taking, synthesis, and divergent thinking. Collaborate with a cohort of diverse changemakers to use systems thinking to analyze complex challenges and design thinking to ideate, prototype, and test solutions that are socially just and environmentally sustainable. Strengthen your storytelling abilities as well as your capacity to connect authentically with others and inspire them to action. Engage with exemplars of creative leadership from across the world and a range of industries, gaining insights into their practices and thinking. Advance your personal goals through a process of identifying the changes you want to make in your career, organization, or community, reflecting on your growth through the program, and developing your distinctive leadership philosophy and style.