New Brunswick College of Craft and Design

The New Brunswick College of Craft and Design (NBCCD) is a centre for the study of fine craft and design. Its campus is located in downtown Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, near the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and along the Saint John River. The College The College features a studio-based education with a hands-on entrepreneurship focus, recognized with a Bachelor of Applied Arts (BAA) offered in partnership with the University of New Brunswick (UNB).^[1]

With small class sizes and an internationally recognized faculty, the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design offers a range of programs from traditional craft studios to contemporary digital design, as well as an Aboriginal Visual Art Program, which features the history and traditional crafts of the Wolastoqey, Mi’kmaq, and Passamaquoddy First Nations Cultures in Atlantic Canada.

NBCCD is also home to craft and art studios, craft workshops as part of edVentures Fredericton's summer programming, and the George Fry Gallery.^[2]

In 1938 the New Brunswick provincial government launched an outreach program designed to train its rural population in hand weaving, providing supplemental income to their traditional work in fishing, farming and forestry. The program was suspended during the Second World War, but during the fifties, under the leadership of Dr Ivan Crowell, a summer schedule of handicraft workshops, delivered near the recently created Fundy National Park, drew participants from Atlantic Canada and throughout New England.

In the sixties what was known as The Crafts School moved to more permanent quarters in Second World War huts on the banks of the Saint John River in Fredericton, offering year-round programs in traditional craft disciplines. In the early eighties the school moved into a 1920s-era warehouse in downtown Fredericton, and under the leadership of George Fry, joined the New Brunswick Community College system (NBCC), and expanded its curriculum to include design disciplines.

In 2010, following recommendations related to The Action Plan for Transformation of Post-Secondary Education in New Brunswick, the College left NBCC, remaining within the Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour, but with a new mandate.

The New Brunswick College of Craft and Design was one of eight Canadian colleges chosen to lead post-secondary initiatives in Brazil as part of the bilateral "Mulheres Mils" project. The partnership was designed to train disadvantaged Brazilian women, in northern and northeastern states of the country, in fashion, handicrafts, and other skills.^[3]