Exchange students

About ENSAD Nancy

ENSAD Nancy is one of the 11 national art schools of the French Ministry of Culture. It is located in a new building designed by Dietrich-Untertrifaller on a recent campus named Artem (Art, Technology, Management), close to the city center. 

The school offers a wide range of facilities and services: 16 workshops are available for our students’ projects (drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramic, printing, 3D designing and printing, photography, cinema and video, gaming, etc.).

With around 220 students, ENSAD Nancy conserves a family-like atmosphere and is home for people from 30 countries.

A peculiarity of the school is its partnership with an engineering school and a business school on the same campus within the Artem Alliance

The school also hosts the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), a post-master’s research center dedicated to typography, that attracts young researchers from all over the world.  

Study plan

Studies at ENSAD Nancy run from Bachelor that we also call “1er cycle” (3 years) to Master, that we also call “2nd cycle”(2 years).
From the first year on, students choose one of our 3 departments:

Fine arts: students are trained in a vast field of artistic practices and techniques (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, film, sound, printed images, etc.) as well as theory (history and current events in art, philosophy and aesthetics, film) and an initiation to research through creation and on creation.
Download the list of courses offered by the Fine Arts department

Graphic design: this department trains graphic designers and “communicators” who are willing to take into consideration all the components of the artistic, graphic and informational ecosystems in which they intervene through a gesture, a printed document or digital publication, a photographic, videographic, scenographic or signage proposal, and more generally images and / or texts.
Download the list of courses offered by the Graphic Design department

Design: this department covers many fields: object design, space design, light design, service design, care design, medical design, interface design, public policy design, fictional design, etc. The Design department has a specific focus on contextutal design through DM-Lab, a research group specialized in that field. 
Download the list of courses offered by the Design department

Catalogue of courses:
You can view the description of each course in this PDF document (in French).

Eligibility and application

Before applying, you should first contact the international office of your home institution to check if they have signed an agreement with our school, and ask them to nominate you.

Once you have been nominated, you will receive a message containing a link to an online form. You will have to fill it outand send it to international(a)ensad-nancy.eu along with the following documents:
– A portfolio (one PDF-file of 15 pages and 3 Mb max) in French or in English
– Your CV (in French or in English)
– A motivation letter describing your project and the classes you are interested in (in French or in English)
– A copy of passport/ID card
– A portrait picture in high definition (jpg file)
– The result of your EU French language placement test

All relevant information can be found in our fact sheet updated each year

French language

As teaching is in French, we highly recommend a B1 level in order to be able to follow the courses. This is a recommendation and not an obligation; most of our teachers can speak English and can do the follow-up in English with the students.

You can assess your level thanks to the French placement test available on the Online Linguistic Support of the European Union

A 6-week French summer course is organized each year on our campus and you will have the possibility to attend French classes run by the Université de Lorraine.

Thanks to our buddy program, you can have French conversation with your mentor students. They are also here to help you with any administrative or pedagogical issue.

Useful documents

Fact sheet (in English)
Student’s handbook (in French)
Catalogue of courses (in French)
Welcome booklet for exchange students (in English)
Finding accomodation in Nancy (in English)

Your contact person

Caroline BARJON 
Head of international relations 
international[a]ensad-nancy.eu
T +33 3 83 41 68 83