RISD Continuing Education

When you join a CE course, you're not just developing art and design skills, you're joining our creative community that will inspire and support your journey. Small class sizes offer hands-on instruction, personalized feedback, and the opportunity to connect with peers.

There's still time to join our creative community with an adult or teen course this spring—registration closes next week.

RISD is celebrating a historic $20 million gift—the largest outright gift in RISD’s history—from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation to establish the Maxwell Scholarship Fund and the Maxwell Global Perspectives Faculty Fund. These funds will shape how art and design are taught and understood for generations—educating artists and designers who are not only skilled, but genuinely equipped to engage the complexity of the world they are making.

The Maxwell Scholarship Fund will add eight new, fully funded tuition scholarships for undergraduate students, and the Maxwell Global Perspectives Faculty Fund will endow two new faculty positions and one rotating visiting residency for scholars, artists, designers, and architects representing global art-making traditions.

Alum Delle Maxwell and her husband Pat Hanrahan cofounded the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation to support individual scientists, teachers, conservationists, and creators whose diverse perspectives enable us to discover new things about ourselves and our world. At RISD, the Foundation also generously supports the Loop Lab and The Movement Lab.

Learn more: https://www.risd.edu/news/for-press/press-releases/rhode-island-school-design-celebrates-20-million-gift-fund-student

There's still time to register for spring! Enrollment for RISD Continuing Education’s adult and teen online and in-person courses closes April 16. Take a class in Providence, Barrington, or Westerly—or learn from wherever you are.

Secure your spot now—https://ce.risd.edu/.

Meet Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, faculty for RISD Continuing Education’s Summer Intensive transfer credit course, “History, Haunting, Memory: To Ghost is to Stay.”⁠
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Naimah is a Black feminist scholar, dancer and educator. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at , and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Pétigny’s research and teaching is shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer, racial justice facilitator, and dancer in professional ensembles. Pétigny holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Vassar College and earned her PhD in Feminist Studies in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2021. Pétigny’s work has been published in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal and the Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies.⁠
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In this course, students will engage the fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence or presence of figures from the past; and the representation of traumatic memories in social life. Using a range of texts and other materials, we will examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism.⁠
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Check out Pétigny's recent work "Haunting erotics: theorizing Black erotic aliveness" and a special issue of Agitate! "Seditious Acts: Being in, But Not of, the Neoliberal University."⁠
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This online course runs June 22–July 26. Secure your spot and learn more—link in bio.⁠
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Second slide: Leslie Parker Dance Project, Call to Remember, 2020. Pictured, left to right: mayfield brooks, Amara T. Smith, Vie Boheme, Leslie Parker. Photo: Adriana Foreman. Third slide: Naimah Petígny at the Seditious Acts symposium discussing the commitments of graduate students and faculty of color to disrupt the neoliberal University in April 27, 2017. Last slide: Pétigny and a troupe of dancers prepare to perform Corbeaux (Crows) by Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, 2017.

Summer adult courses are now open! Join us in Providence, Westerly, or Barrington—or learn from anywhere.

Enroll now and use code EARLYBIRDCE for 10% off tuition.

Link in bio

Meet Chloe Zimmerman, faculty for RISD Continuing Education’s Summer Intensive transfer credit course, “Mycological Arts.”⁠
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An artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Providence, Chloe’s practice engages ecologies, documentary poetics, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her teaching brings together fungi, film, poetry, and expanded forms of making to explore how we understand and relate to the world around us.⁠
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In "Mycological Arts", fungi—particularly mycelium and the mushrooms that emerge from vast subterranean networks—serve as a framework for thinking about connection, place, decomposition and world-making.
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Students will learn through creative experimentation, readings, research and observing fungi where they live, while participating in live online sessions with a global community of artists and fungi enthusiasts. ⁠
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The course draws on a range of influential voices, including Merlin Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, and Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, alongside artists, scientists and organizations including the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and the RISD Nature Lab.
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Students will translate these inquiries into original creative work in the medium of their choice—developing both conceptual depth and a personal, interdisciplinary practice.⁠
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Early bird registration is open through April 1. Course runs June 22–July 26. Secure your spot and learn more—link in bio.⁠
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Slide 1: Photo of Chloe Zimmerman; Slide 2–3: “Fruiting Bodies”, in collaboration with Lucia Monge and Christopher Kennedy; Slide 4–5: Mycological Research PlayGroup; Slide 6: How to Organize Like Mycelium, from “Let’s Become Fungal!” Mycelium Teachings and the Arts" by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez; Slide 7: from SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks); Slide 8: From RISD Fungi Arts Research Studio, co-taught with Florence Wallis; Slide 9: photo by Chloe Zimmerman; Slide 10: photo of Chloe Zimmerman.

Plan your summer in the studio or online! Enrollment for summer in-person and online adult courses at RISD Continuing Education opens next week—immerse yourself in art and design.

*Use coupon code EARLYBIRDCE to save 10% on tuition for RISD Continuing Education classes for adults this summer. Offer expires 11:59 pm ET on 4/21/26.

Artwork by Melissa Mendro.

Learn more on our website—link in bio.

“I firmly believe that creative experimentation is essential for learning—students should create with freedom.”

In Starting a Podcast: Finding Your Voice, students learn how to bring an idea to life and turn it into a podcast they can share with the world—no previous experience required.

“It’s a genuine joy to see students go from having an initial idea to a podcast they can actually share.”

Taught by a working podcast creator and RISD CE Instructor, Rob Quicke — who recently collaborated with the BBC in London, this course helps students build confidence in their voice and their story.

“Once you accept who you are, you’re capable of creating podcasts that resonate with an audience because of your authenticity.”

Ready to start your podcast?

Enroll now for Starting a Podcast: Finding Your Voice before. Want to learn more? Visit www.robquicke.com