New York

New York gives film and performing arts students access to the industries they study at their working source, from Broadway houses staging eight shows a week to the Astoria studios where television has been made for a century. For a group travelling from Dubai, it is a single long-haul flight to a city where the classroom is the street corner, the rehearsal room and the theatre stalls.

Groups work across Midtown's Theater District, where backstage tours and workshops with Broadway performers sit alongside matinee tickets, and cross the East River to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, built beside Kaufman Astoria Studios and holding Jim Henson's puppets and a hands-on gallery on editing, foley and animation. The Paley Center for Media in Midtown opens its broadcast archive to students, while Lincoln Center brings together the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the Juilliard School on one campus. Film locations are everywhere and unusually teachable: Grand Central Terminal, the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park and the Coney Island boardwalk all repay a shot-by-shot approach.