One of the country’s leading arts academies wants AI to be a key part of its offerings.
NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts is cutting a deal with Runway AI that would make AI credits and training available for free to students across a number of programs, including the Hyper Cinema Lab, a university-wide initiative run out of the film school. The tech-minded arts programs ITP and ITM will also be part of the arrangement.
“Our film programs have never been about teaching students to become cookie cutter,” Rubén Polendo, dean of Tisch School of the Arts, said in an interview. “Our film programs teach many ways of making films and invite students to weave their own process. This is an invitation to try another mode of working,” added Polendo, who received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship for AI and Performance.
Runway has licensing deals with a number of schools, including USC, but this formalizes the relationship in a deeper way, with training, free credits and other abetments to use the tool.
“Twenty years ago when you went to film school or art school, the thing they gave you was a camera and maybe an Adobe subscription,” Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO and co-founder of Runway and an alumnus of ITP, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Now they’re giving you access to Runway, which allows you to do pretty much anything you want. For newer generations, this is the new normal.”
Video-generation credits, which can be expensive, will be made available on a generous if not unlimited basis, Valenzuela and Polendo said, ensuring a lot more students’ films will likely be made with some AI component. Enrollees will still be encouraged to shoot in an analogue way if it suits them — student shoots in and around downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square Park are as much a fixture of the downtown landscape as the Waverly Inn and the Astor Place Cube — but will be given tools that make in-model generation a lot more attractive.
Polendo says that part of the goal of the initiative is to figure out the line between human-led and machine-assisted art in real time. “What we’re asking is what bridge can we build into this really innovative interface between film and visuals and large language models and navigating the ethics of generating original content,” he said.
ITP and ITM (official names: the Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts) are graduate-level programs known for their innovative and at times whimsical explorations at the nexus of tech, art and media. The Hypercinema Lab operates between those two programs and the film school. The mainline film school — the place of Spike Lee, Todd Solondz and Kasi Lemmons — is not part of the agreement at this time.
Moves like this could expand the already-broad battleground of AI and art into schools, where advocates see the tech as a way to realize the visions of people working without a budget — physical shoots are, after all, expensive — while opponents worry it will discourage knowledge and deployment of traditional techniques.
The move also continues an effort from Runway to gain traction both with Hollywood studios (the company has a deal with Lionsgate and informal relationships with many other companies) and Madison Avenue on the one hand, and the younger generation that will one day be working at them on the other. Asked if he finds more resistance from studios or academia, Valenzuela said he wasn’t seeing much in either place.
“Acceptance of this type of models within studios, schools and companies is large already. There might be a very small minority [objecting], but I don’t think that they’re in any way shaping the discourse anymore. These are extremely useful and valuable tools for creatives and filmmakers and talent and it’s hard to say otherwise. I mean, the results are there. You can just see people having fun and be much more productive.”
He added, “I mean, look, there are people who resist flying on airplanes because they have their own ideas about them. But the default population is already on board with flying on airplanes. I would say the same about AI.”
AI has certainly become a bigger part of advanced arts programs, with schools such as SCAD and RISD offering classes on the subject, though not always without controversy.
Polendo says he understands that some institutions may be resistant to making AI tools available but that this isn’t the policy at Tisch.
“We welcome the future,” he said. “That’s the whole proposition here.”
