More than just stimulating and facilitating artist-researchers, docARTES provides a 4-year doctoral curriculum, consisting of research and training. It allows doctoral students to develop their artistic qualities, broaden their academic knowledge and expand their methodological skills. This curriculum is supplemented by individual research supervision. docARTES is also integrated in a professional artistic research biotope, preparing doctoral students for a professional career as artistic researcher.
The docARTES curriculum is run at Orpheus Institute in Ghent, together with Flemish and Dutch partner institutes since January 2004. There are currently about 60 doctoral students with very diverse backgrounds involved in practice-based research projects in the docARTES programme. More than 40 PhD graduates have completed their research culminating in artistic presentations and a public defence of their thesis.