Education
Students of Leiden University, the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art can follow practical and academic art education at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts. The courses on offer give Bachelor and Master students the opportunity to develop both their artistic and academic talents to the full.

The ACPA offers the following activities:

• academic electives in music, art, design and the philosophy of music, which have been developed by the Academy and are taught in The Hague and Leiden;
• the talent programmes Practicum Musicae at the Royal Conservatoire and Practicum Artium at the Royal Academy of Art for students of Leiden University;
• student exchanges: the possibility for students in Leiden to follow electives at the Royal Conservatoire or the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and for art and music students to follow academic courses at Leiden University;
• the docARTES programme for a PhD in Music.

Research
The ACPA provides an environment in which musicians, artists and designers conduct research on the basis of their own artistic practice. By studying their own practice, artist-researchers develop new insights and methods, while at the same time exploring the theoretical underpinning of their work, which frequently generates new works of art. The aim of the artistic research is to deepen and broaden the students’ vision of their own artistic practice.

An important component of the research at the ACPA, and one that is unique in the Netherlands, is the 'PhD in the Arts’: students can conduct research at the ACPA to earn a doctorate from Leiden University. ACPA’s core academic staff consists of three professors and three university lecturers. Together they are responsible for the research and for supervising the more than sixty PhD candidates studying at the ACPA. The ACPA offers two doctoral programmes in the arts: docARTES for music (in association with the Orpheus Institute in Ghent) and PhDArts for art and design.