Creating the title sequence for the “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” film was a career-defining moment for Rochester Institute of Technology College of Art and Design graduate Erin Sarofsky. It was her first Marvel main title and it changed everything for her career.
And it wasn’t just any career, but one that sat at the intersection of technology, the arts, and entertainment industries.
But that wasn’t Sarofsky’s first brush with Hollywood success stories. She had already been collaborating with Joe and Anthony Russo long before that. Their first project together was the titles for hit sitcom “Community.” In fact, they were the ones who recommended her to Marvel.
Since then, Sarofsky has founded a studio in her name that is now best known for its prolific title sequences for several Marvel films, including “Ant-Man,” “Doctor Strange,” and “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and the 2025 “Superman” film.
Sarofsky believes RIT set her up for a “career where hands-on craft and technology could coexist.” “RIT let me roam — design, computer graphics, photography, 3D, programming, even classes in the School for American Crafts. That range made my friends more interesting and my experience so much richer,” she says.
All those perspectives didn’t turn her into a master of every discipline, but they made her curious. “They gave me the language to collaborate with almost anyone — and the openness to see how tech and art can collide in exciting ways,” says the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design alumna.
The College of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology serves as the university’s creative hub, merging technology, the arts, and design. Source: Rochester Institute of Technology
The college is one of the country’s top art and design schools nestled within one of the most highly ranked comprehensive universities in the country. Here, both facilities and faculty are world-class. Professors are award-winning artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers and creative technologists. Together with alumni, their accolades include Emmy Awards, 15 Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, Peabody Awards, and an Edward MacDowell Medal, and their titles include Guggenheim Fellows, Magnum photographers, and Fulbright scholars.
Campus is home to more than 2,700 international students from over 100 countries making their own pursuit towards the pinnacle of creative success.
“When you combine this with our rankings and combination of technology, the arts, and design, I think you are really looking at a truly distinctive type of experience for our art and design students,” says Dr Todd Jokl, Dean, College of Art and Design. “RIT and the College of Art and Design, take students to that next level of professional readiness where our graduates stand out due to their unique skillset combining professional and technical readiness with their personalised creative vision. This is what employers are seeking and this is what our alumni deliver.”
The college offers MFA programmes in Ceramics, Film and Animation, Fine Arts Studio, Furniture Design, Glass, Industrial Design, Metals and Jewellery Design, Photography and Related Media, and Visual Communication Design.
Each programme combines artistic exploration with focused technical training, helping students build both creative voice and professional confidence. Just ask Ruorui Mu, an MFA in Metals and Jewellery Design graduate student, who like previous cohorts, even got to take part in Rochester Fashion Week, where they walk the runway to show off their pieces.
“My experience has been great,” she says. “Our programme really gives you the space to explore and make whatever you want. I’ve been able to try different materials and ideas, and it’s helped me grow a lot as an artist.”
The same was true for Deanna Moorehead, a 2025 graduate of the MFA in Film and Animation. She found that the core courses exposed her to multiple approaches within animation, and the programme gave her enough space to follow the areas that interested her most. “I found out that I really like rigging, which is the process of creating the digital CGI model of an animated character, including its joints and movements,” she says. “I was able to take a rigging class, a follow-up independent study, and centre the production of two of my three films around the rigging process.”
Moorehead’s rigging-focused reel helped land her a job as a 3D technical artist at a visualisation and animation company.
At Rochester Institute of Technology, students learn from professional faculty using state-of-the-art facilities, preparing them to create, showcase, and make an impact in their field. Source: Rochester Institute of Technology
Moorehead worked as a rigging artist for a few MAGIC Spell Studios projects, as well as for some of the films by her peers – experience that gave her “a lot of great industry-style practice.”
That’s to be expected when your university is in western New York state. Not only is it surrounded by some of the country’s best forests, lakes, and outdoors, it’s also situated within driving distance to some of the great arts and cultural metropolises of eastern North America, like Toronto and New York City.
“You really get the best of both worlds at RIT, where students have the space and time to develop their craft, but also the connections to industries where students get hands-on experience with the professional world,” says Jokl. “Whether it’s at our bucolic campus in beautiful western New York, studying at our RIT in LA programme, or engaged in our international campuses — RIT Croatia or RIT Dubai — our students have opportunities to be truly global artists, designers, and filmmakers, and creative technologists.”
