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The Cornish School of Allied Arts was founded by Nellie C. Cornish in 1914 as the Cornish School of Music, located in the Booth Building at Broadway and Pine Street in Seattle. Nellie Cornish wanted to educate artists through exposure to all art forms, and within the next few years, expanded the curriculum to offer courses in dance, visual arts, theater, and design. The school became the first in the western United States to offer comprehensive training in all of the arts.

Nellie Cornish recruited both famous and unknown artists for her faculty, including painter Mark Tobey, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and artists fleeing from the Russian revolution, such as Peter Merenblum. Her focus, however, was not to bring art to a privileged elite, but to nurture creativity in the average person and enrich the lives of all, not just the talented, by means of art.

After World War I, and faced with the Cornish School's impending financial crisis, a group of prominent, welthy women and their husbands formed a Board of Trustees to raise funds for a new facility. In 1921, the School moved to a new, picturesque building on East Roy Street, with Nellie Cornish living in an upstairs apartment.

While the School's programs flourished, Cornish faced repeated financial crises. In 1924, with the school unable to pay the mortgage on its property, a group of benefactors formed the non-profit Cornish School Foundation to manage finances, and named Nellie Cornish the lifetime director of educational programs, working in coordination with the Foundation's Board of Trustees and the Women's Advisory Committee. After 1939, with the resignation of Nellie Cornish, a Faculty governing Board directed the school until 1946. The Music and Art Foundation, a women's civic organization formed in 1923 to encourage young people to develop their creative and artistic talents, assumed ownership and administrative responsibility of the Cornish School in 1954.

In 1977, Cornish School of Allied Arts became Cornish Institute of Allied Arts, a fully accredited college offering Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees. In 1986, the college was renamed the Cornish College of the Arts. Cornish College opened a new campus in downtown Seattle in 2003.