Hixiapa - my 2022 MFA thesis exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
If you’re applying to MFA programs, you may already know how vulnerable and confusing this process can feel.
Maybe you’re a multidisciplinary artist. Maybe your work lives across performance, installation, social practice, digital media, ritual, writing, or community-based forms that don’t always fit neatly into traditional expectations.
Maybe you’ve worried that because you’re not primarily a painter, sculptor, or photographer, you won’t be seen as a “real” artist by the people reviewing your application.
The truth is that many talented artists do not get rejected because they lack vision.
They get rejected because they were never shown how to frame that vision clearly, curate their materials strategically, or translate a rich and unconventional practice into language and images an admissions committee can understand quickly.
Get MFA application support beyond this post
If you’re applying to MFA programs and want more than inspiration, join my Mutant Magic Newsletter. You can subscribe for free to get updates about workshops, application support, and new resources, or join Portal for deeper breakdowns of the materials that helped me get accepted into UC Berkeley’s MFA program.
Free subscribers get occasional updates, public offerings, and new resources.
Portal members get deeper breakdowns of successful application materials, including access to a blog post about what made my MFA’s cover letter and personal statement successful.
Constellation members get everything in Portal plus deeper support and first access to limited offerings and artworks.
What this video offers
In the video on this page, I share the portfolio that helped me get accepted into UC Berkeley’s fully funded MFA Art Practice program after years of applying. I walk through the actual body of work and point to one of the shifts that changed everything for me: learning how to position and sequence my materials more strategically, especially the opening images.
This is not about copying my portfolio. It’s about helping you understand how a nontraditional artist can build coherence, momentum, and trust inside an application so the committee is more likely to keep looking, stay curious, and invite you further in.
Revealing The MFA Art Portfolio That Got Me Accepted To UC Berkeley!
You are not too much
If you have a multi-passionate, interdisciplinary, or hard-to-categorize practice, you may have been made to feel like your work is too scattered, too weird, too spiritual, too political, too digital, too performative, or just too difficult to place. I know that terrain intimately, and my acceptance proves there is room for artists who refuse to flatten themselves to fit narrow institutional expectations.
What helped my application stand out was not pretending to be a more conventional artist. It was learning how to present my actual practice with more clarity, structure, and confidence.
What made my application stronger
Here are some of the things I believe helped:
Showing a multi-hyphenate practice while still creating a strong sense of coherence.
Curating a portfolio where each piece contributed to a larger story about my work.
Strategically contextualizing nontraditional forms like performance, social practice, and community-based work.
Documenting ephemeral work in a way that still felt compelling and legible on the page.
Framing digital, spiritual, ancestral, and experimental practices as integral to the work rather than as side notes.