Hillman came back to Atlanta on a real campus: The filming locations of A Different World
A Different World
Thirty-nine years after the original series premiered on NBC, A Different World returns. And this time, the fictional Hillman College is built from real HBCU campuses. The pilot was filmed in July 2025 at Clark Atlanta University – fans posted footage of production in the Atlanta University Center from the start.
Full series principal photography began on February 5, 2026, and wrapped on April 27, with filming spread across the Atlanta University Center's real HBCU campuses, including Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College.
Much of the series was filmed around the Atlanta University Center Consortium – the largest contiguous group of HBCUs in the world, home to Clark Atlanta, Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown and the Interdenominational Theological Center. Its campus buildings, quad spaces and student life infrastructure gave the revival something the original series, filmed on Burbank soundstages, could never have provided: the actual physical world of HBCU life.
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Showrunner Felicia Pride was direct about what the location change means: "One of the things is that we moved from multi-cam to single-cam, which means that we can see Hillman in a way that we weren't able to see in the original series because it was taped on stages."
A Different World premieres on Netflix on September 24, 2026.
SOURCE
TheGrio // What's on Netflix // Wikipedia // Deadline
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