The Warsaw School of Photography and Graphic Design is a unique international school in the capital of Poland. We offer a distinctive, personalized education for students who are at least 18 years old and have graduated from secondary school in any country. There is no upper age limit.

Young persons face the problem of finding work in a profession which passions them. To help them, we encourage them to find more about themselves and at the same time a way of harmonizing with modern society without losing their integrity, talent, creativity, uniqueness and above all their soul.

We also welcome older students who for years have made a living and feel that they would like to change their profession. We are very glad to receive people of any age who have the impression there is a spiritual, creative dimension lacking in their lives and want to do something about it. We will help them find it. We respect the individual path of students from those who want to make a successful career, ambition to become internationally known or be at the front of the avant-garde to those who seek poetic, everlasting, transcendental values in their work.  You will find all possible directions, even contradictory, among our faculty. We will help you find the path that corresponds best to your personality, sensitivity and vision. We acknowledge that the best way of learning is not by repetition or by taking for granted what others teach you, even if they are masters in their fields. Learning means asking the right questions and discovering their solutions by oneself. We begin by discovering what is already known until we make our way to the unknown and find our own solutions. 

The Warsaw School of Photography and Graphic Design was founded in 2000 by Marian Schmidt, a renaissance man born in Poland in 1945. Besides being a photographer and filmmaker, he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in the US in 1969. While living in France, he studied Phenomenology of Music with Sergiu Celibidache and played the traverse flute with l’Orchestre de flûtes du Val-de-Marne. He is the author of three books (two in French and one in Polish) and is currently writing a book on photography (in English). His greatest sources of inspiration are Jiddu Krishnamurti, with whom he stayed in England and Switzerland, Hermann Hesse and Sergiu Celibidache.

A word about Poland’s rich artistic heritage. Poland is internationally known as a country of great artists: poets and Nobel Prize winners Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996); theater directors Konrad Swinarski and Jerzy Grotowski; film directors Andrzej Wajda, Wojciech Has, Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Krzysztof Kieślowski; poster designers: Henryk Tomaszewski, Jan Lenica and Mieczysław Wasilewski (who teaches at our school).

Polish photographers also represent a very high artistic and professional level. They are making their way into the international scene. Besides a continuous contact with our faculty members, our students benefit from regular visits of well- known guest photographers, designers and other artists. You will have the chance to meet them.

Our Graphic Design department was created in October 2012 to offer a rich and concentrated three year programme which is seldom proposed in other institutions. In 2013 the number of admitted students doubled as a result of our spreading reputation. Our distinguished faculty is made up of professors from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and successful professionals. Polish graphic designers have a worldwide reputation and the Polish School of Posters greatly influenced the international development of graphic design in poster art.