NSCAD University, also called the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, is a post-secondary art school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It was founded in 1887 by Anna Leonowens and later became the first degree-granting art school in Canada.

Library and galleries

The NSCAD University Library was founded early in the school’s history and is now located in the Fountain Campus. It is the only art and design library in Atlantic Canada. Its collection includes over 50,000 books and periodicals as well as the Visual Resources Collection, which comprises 140,000 slides, 16mm films, video tapes and other multimedia materials. The library is a member of Novanet, which facilitates inter-library loans between Nova Scotian academic libraries.

Historical fine arts and ceramics; contemporary fine arts and printmaking collections are housed in the Anna Leonowens Gallery, founded in 1968. The gallery hosts exhibitions of the work of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, visiting artists and curators.The Port Campus hosts the Port Loggia Gallery.

The university was also formerly home to the Seeds Gallery, a non-profit gallery where students and alumni could show and sell their work. This made NSCAD the only art school in Canada to offer a dedicated commercial gallery, helping students tradition from academia to entrepreneurship. It was founded by SUNSCAD, the students’ union, who turned over control of the gallery to the university in 2007. In 2011 the university moved the gallery from Hollis Street to a more peripheral location at the Seaport, where it had to pay rent for the first time.The new space was a 1,000 square feet (93 m²) gallery in the Annex Building, directly across the street from the Port Campus.

In September 2013 the university board of governors decided to close the Seeds Gallery on 31 March 2014. The university governance stated that closure was a cost-saving measure in light of the gallery’s $40,000 yearly deficit. The students’ union criticized the absence of consultation surrounding the decision and blamed the gallery’s financial woes on the decision to relocate it to the Seaport.It stated that the gallery had been on the path to financial sustainability while at Hollis Street.

In January 2016 the Anna Leonowens Gallery founded the Art Bar + Projects, a space for performance art.