Comfy and UAL's Creative Computing Institute Announce Creative Campus Partnership

Comfy Org, the team behind ComfyUI, the open-source node-based interface for generative AI, and the Creative Computing Institute (CCI) at University of the Arts London today announced a Creative Campus partnership, making CCI a founding partner of the Comfy Education Initiative.

CCI already runs ComfyUI at every level of the institute. On the Applied Machine Learning for Creatives masters course, students build image, video, audio, and text workflows, train their own models, and construct interactive pipelines. PhD researchers use Comfy for fine-tuning, custom datasets, and custom node development. The institute also uses ComfyUI in industry training, where its node-based interface gives non-technical collaborators a way into generative AI that code alone does not.

"ComfyUI has become part of how we teach, research, and work with industry. It is one of the few generative AI environments where the workflows our students build are portable, inspectable, and forkable, and that open-source foundation is exactly what a university should be teaching on."

Prof Mick Grierson, Research Leader, UAL Creative Computing Institute

Through the partnership, CCI educators and students gain access to classroom licenses with central billing & administration, educational discounts, early access to upcoming team features, a dedicated educator community with direct support from the Comfy team, and a voice in shaping the future of the education program.

Creative Campus partnerships are the deepest tier of the program: a direct, ongoing collaboration in which an institution works hand in hand with the Comfy team to roll out ComfyUI across teaching, research, and industry training.

"CCI is the model we hope every creative campus follows: ComfyUI in the masters classroom, in PhD research, and in industry collaboration, all at once. As our first Creative Campus Partner, they are helping us design an education program that works the way universities actually work."

The Comfy Team

The institute is leading a major £1.5 million publicly funded research programme developing copyright-compliant audiovisual foundation models for the UK's creative industries. Bringing together expertise in sound, image, and artificial intelligence, the project is building open tools and responsible AI national infrastructure designed to support UK creative production, research, and experimentation across the sector.

The outputs of the research will explore wider dissemination and adoption through open, node-based tools such as ComfyUI to support experimentation, workflows, and collaboration around emerging multimodal AI systems.

UAL CCI joins a founding cohort of educators and institutions featured at the launch of the Comfy Education Initiative, alongside researchers such as CCI co-founder Dr. Phoenix Perry, whose Antigravity Machine project Comfy supports as an industry partner.

About the Creative Computing Institute at UAL

The Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London applies computing to creativity and social impact, operating at the intersection of computational technologies and creative practice, teaching undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students alongside research and industry collaboration.