Hi, so I’m a rising junior at Hamilton College and I’m planning ahead and considering going to grad school. I’m trying to find a good MFA program that is preferably low residency so that I can live where I really want to live (the Bay Area). I want to study screenwriting, specifically writing for television, and/or playwriting. Does anyone have any good programs I could look into?
Well, it depends on your interests and why you want an MFA. But the truth for right now is that most good MFA programs aren’t low residency. Most graduate programs build their strength on the community of scholars (students and professors) in the department. A writing MFA program will lean even more heavily on this; students will workshop each other’s work.
The truth is often that if you are really serious about graduate work, you probably have to temporarily live somewhere else while you earn the degree. You could always move to the Bay Area when you finish the MFA.
Los Angeles has several good MFA programs in screenwriting - USC, UCLA, and Loyola Marymount all have great programs, as does the American Film Institute. Chapman University is in the LA metro area (in Orange) and also has a good MFA program in screenwriting.
There are other good ones all over the country, including New York (NYU Tisch, Columbia, New York Film Academy), Boston (Boston U, Emerson College), and the South (UGA, UT-Austin, Florida State, University of Miami).
Most of the low residency MFA programs I can find are for creative writing, not for screenwriting specifically. I don’t know anything about the quality of these programs, but they aren’t ranked highly. Some of them are Warren Wilson College, Pacific University Oregon, and Antioch University in Los Angeles.
Wikipedia has a non-exhaustive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-residency_program#United_States