Willem de Kooning Academy visits PCA

PCA recently welcomed a group of first year students in Leisure and Event Management from Willem de Kooning Academy on an field trip to Paris, led by David de Prez, Arno Brouwer and Ofra Beenen. WdK Academy, located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is a PCA exchange partner that regularly welcomes PCA students as well as sends out study abroad students to Paris.

After a welcome breakfast, the students were shown the campus, the studios and fablabs, before attending a general presentation about the school with Study Abroad Program Manager Léa Ponchel-Bourgain. Simba Kamuriwo and Abi Duckham, Student Life counselors, shared with them the services provided by the student life team, and the classroom part of the field trip ended with a presentation on PCA’s pedagogical system and interdisciplinary approach, as well as the tools available to acomodate a student’ s special needs by Alana Manga, Director of Student Success and Registrar.

The field day didn’t stop there! Léa Ponchel-Bourgain took the students to the Fiminco Foundation and the FRAC Île-de-France (Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain) to start a conversation about contemporary art with the students, some of whom will be art curators, and to discuss what is happening on the French visual arts scene these days.

Mariana Folache, rising junior in Fine Arts at PCA will be spending her fall semester experiencing a different cultural and pedagogical context at Willem de Kooning Academy, and jumped on the opportunity to meet and connect with students she will see again on the WdKa campus this fall.