Nuart Journal publishes provocative and critical writings on a range of topics relating to street art practice and urban art cultures.

Nuart Journal is a forum for critical discourse and commentary on urban art, defined as broadly as possible to include all aspects of both independently sanctioned and unsanctioned art in public space that does not fall under the general rubric of traditional public art practice. Relevant topics of discussion include – but are not limited to – practical and theoretical explorations of graffiti, post-graffiti, muralism, street art, post-street art, and activism.

Nuart Journal brings together diverse perspectives and includes traditional peer-reviewed academic papers as well as more experimental modes of research. It is a site for scholars as well as artists, curators and independent researchers to publish articles, conversations, reviews, projects, and opinion pieces on street art and related topics.

The journal is built on the foundations of Nuart Plus in Stavanger Norway, and Aberdeen, Scotland – the world’s first annual symposium dedicated to street art practice. The critically renowned Nuart festival is widely considered the world’s leading celebration of street art. Nuart has long been a place for catalysing important debates around street art and for challenging entrenched notions of what art is. The journal strives to bring these conversations to a wider audience.

Nuart does not adhere strictly to disciplinary boundaries and will consider relevant contributions from within any discipline. We welcome submissions from a broad range of authors including cultural heritage workers, historians, critics, cultural and human geographers, political theorists, anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, curators, artists, writers, taggers, anarchists, and out and out vandals.

Please consult the Instructions for Authors if you are interested in publishing work with Nuart Journal.

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Martyn Reed, Nuart, Stavanger (NO)
Martyn Reed is a British artist, writer, independent researcher, curator & exhibition organizer based in Stavanger, Norway. He is the founder and artistic director of the Nuart Festivals and network. Much of Reed’s work and the platforms he devises are international collaborative events that revolve around promoting art as part of everyday life using counter cultural strategies, values and thinking. He is a regular contributor to Juxtapoz magazine and has written extensively on street art and its related practices for numerous books and periodicals.

Susan Hansen, Middlesex University, London (UK)
Susan Hansen (PhD) is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in visual sociology, art history and forensic psychology. She is Chair of the Visual and Creative Methods Group at Middlesex University London, Editor Emerita of Visual Studies journal, and President of the International Visual Sociology Association. Susan is Europe’s most cited street art scholar and is currently ranked third in the field, internationally. She has published more than 50 articles and chapters, a co-authored book, and a further book with Routledge is due in 2025. Susan is committed to connecting with non-traditional audiences, and to making the culture of the arts more inclusive and impactful. As the academic lead for Nuart Festival, with Festival Director Martyn Reed she has co-developed Nuart’s annual conference which draws together a productive mix of artists and allied creatives, researchers, policy-makers and communities.

ONLINE EDITOR

Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Sæter Jørgensen Contemporary (NO/FR)
Erik Sæter Jørgensen is the founder of Sæter Jørgensen Contemporary, a non-profit gallery for emerging and underrepresented art, a nomadic curatorial platform and studio practice. Sæter Jørgensen Contemporary was established in 2018 to provide a platform for artists to realise untraditional projects while receiving the comprehensive, long-term support associated with a traditional gallery model. Before founding his own company, Sæter Jørgensen was gallery manager at Galleri Opdahl, a leading contemporary art gallery in Scandinavia. He has also been co-curator at the project space Prosjektrom Normanns in Stavanger, Norway and an editor at NATT&DAG, a monthly free urban magazine based in Norway covering music, movies, fashion and visual arts.

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Daniël de Jongh (NL)
Daniël de Jongh is an investigative journalist, editor and translator based in the Netherlands.

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

Studio Bergini (UK)

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD

Alison Young, University of Melbourne (AU)
Alison Young is the Francine V. McNiff Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Alison is the author of Street Art World (2016), Street Art, Public City (2014), Street/Studio (2010), Judging the Image (2005) and Imagining Crime (1996), as well as numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime, and the image. She is the founder of the Urban Environments Research Network, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, activists and architects. She’s also a Research Convenor within the Future Cities Cluster in the Melbourne Sustainable Societies Institute, and is a member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, policymakers and urban designers interested in communicative cities, mobility, networked cultures, and public space. She is currently researching the relationships between art, culture, crime and urban atmospheres.

Bahia Shehab, American University in Cairo (EG)
Bahia Shehab is an artist, designer and art historian. She is associate professor of design and founder of the graphic design program at The American University in Cairo. Her artwork has been on display in exhibitions, galleries and streets internationally and was featured in the 2015 documentary Nefertiti’s Daughters. Her work has received a number of international recognitions and awards; TED fellowship (2012) and TED Senior fellowship (2016), BBC 100 Women list (2013), The American University in Beirut distinguished alumna (2015), Shortlist for V&A’s Jameel Prize 4 (2016), and a Prince Claus Award (2016). Her publications include A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif. She is the first Arab woman to receive the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.

David Pinder, Roskilde University (DK)
David Pinder is Professor of Urban Studies at Roskilde University, in Denmark. His research focuses on urbanism and critical urban theory, on utopia and possible urban worlds, and on art practice, performance and the politics of space. His writings have ranged from the ideas and practices of avant-garde movements, particularly the situationists, to more contemporary forms of psychogeography, radical cartography, and artistic urban exploration and intervention. Among his publications is the book Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (2005), and a co-edited forthcoming issue of Performance Research On drifting (2018). Before moving to Roskilde, he taught at Queen Mary University of London for sixteen years and also held visiting positions at Princeton University and at City University of New York Graduate Center.

Enrico Bonadio, City University of London (UK)
Enrico Bonadio is Reader in Intellectual Property law at City, University of London. He teaches, lectures and advises in the field of intellectual property (IP) law. His research interests focus on legal protection of non-conventional forms of creativity including street and graffiti art (amongst other topics). He has published extensively, including the books Copyright in the Street – An Oral History of Creative Processes in the Street Art and Graffiti Subcultures (Cambridge University Press 2023) and Protecting Art in the Street – A Photographic Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti’ (Dokument Press 2020). He also edited several books including The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Non-Conventional Copyright – Do New and Atypical Works Deserve Protection? (Elgar 2018). Enrico works with various international organisations and governments on IP issues and regularly joins training and technical assistance missions organised by World Intellectual Property Organisation. He frequently appears in the media as IP expert.

Erik Hannerz, Lund University (SE)
Erik Hannerz is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 2014 and his main research interest is subcultural groups, and particularly the cultural sociological refinement of the concepts of subculture and mainstream. His publications also include urban sociology and ethnography. Hannerz is a faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.

Jacob Kimvall, Stockholm University (SE)
Jacob Kimvall is lecturer on visual culture and art history, and art critic. His PhD-thesis THE G-WORD: virtuosity and violation, negotiating and transforming graffiti (Dokument Press, 2014) looks at historical and contemporary discursive transformations of graffiti as art and and crime. He has a background as graffiti writer, and already in 1992 he co-founded the international graffiti magazine Underground Productions (UP), and worked as one of the magazine’s editors throughout the 1990-ties. He is currently working at Department of Culture and and Aesthetics, Stockholm University and Berghs School of Communication. He is a member of the board of Swedish Art Critics Association, the Swedish section of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).

Javier Abarca, Urbanario/The Tag Conference/Unlock Book Fair (ES)
Javier Abarca is an artist, researcher and educator in the fields of graffiti and street art. A leading figure from the first generation of Spanish graffiti, he taught a class on graffiti and street art at the Complutense University of Madrid between 2006 and 2015. He is founder and director of the Unlock Book Fair and the Tag Conference. He founded the website Urbanario in 2008. He works in teaching, curating and writing across Europe.

Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University (USA)
Jeff Ferrell is Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University, USA, and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, UK. He is author of the books Crimes of Style, Tearing Down the Streets, Empire of Scrounge, and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, the first and second editions of Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, winner of the 2009 Distinguished Book Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology. He is co-editor of the books Cultural Criminology, Ethnography at the Edge, Making Trouble, Cultural Criminology Unleashed, and Cultural Criminology: Theories of Crime. Jeff Ferrell is founding and current editor of the New York University Press book series Alternative Criminology, and one of the founding editors of Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, winner of the ALPSP 2006 Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal. In 1998 Ferrell received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the Critical Criminology Division of the American Society of Criminology. His latest book, Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge, is published with University of California Press.

Julia Tulke, University of Rochester (US)
Julia Tulke is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, Atlanta. Located at the intersections of urban studies, visual culture, and anthropology, Tulke’s work centres on the visual and spatial politics of crisis, with Athens as her central site of engagement. Her research in and on the city through the past decade has grappled with various forms of ‘crisis creativity’, including political street art and graffiti, queer and feminist protest, and artist-run spaces. Her writing has appeared in the journals City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action and Forum Kritische Archäologie, in the edited volumes The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity (I.B. Tauris, 2019), as well as elsewhere. Tulke’s longitudinal research project Aesthetics of Crisis won the 2022 Prosser Award for Visual Methodologies from the International Visual Sociology Association.

Lachlan MacDowall, MIECAT Institute (AU)
Dr. Lachlan MacDowall is a writer, photographer and curator based in Melbourne, where he is the Director of the MIECAT Institute. He has presented and published widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti, street art and urban informality. His current projects examine new methods of graffiti research using photography, writing and data. He is the author of Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era (2019) and with Kylie Budge, Art after Instagram: Art Spaces, Audience, Aesthetics (2022). Together with Miles Brown, MacDowall curates Flash Forward, a programme of art and music commissions.

Laima Nomeikaite, Roskilde University (DK) & University of South-Eastern Norway (NO)
Laima Nomeikaite is a researcher, human geographer and physical improviser. In recent years she has worked on a variety of projects related to culture, heritage research and urban planning. She has led the research project Street art, heritage and urban space as part of the broader urban heritage research project – BY-SIS at the Norwegian Institute for cultural heritage research (NIKU). The project has investigated the relationship between street art, heritage and space/place. She is particularly interested in the interlink between heritage, arts, city and space/place. In 2023 she obtained her PhD at Roskilde University with her thesis Street Art, Heritage and More-Than-Representational Approaches.

Lu Pan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (CN)
Pan Lu is Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Pan is author of two monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016) andAestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2015). She is co-editor of the book Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia (Los Angeles and Hong Kong: Bridge 21, 2015). Her articles on various topics also appear in leading academic journals in cultural and visual studies such as Continuum, Public Art Dialogue, Journal of Cultural Research, European Journal of East Asia Studies, etc.

Mike Watson, John Cabot University (IT)
Mike Watson is a theorist, critic and curator based in Italy who is principally focused on the relation between art, new media and politics. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Goldsmiths College and has curated at both the 55th and 56th Venice Biennale. In May 2016 he published a book entitled Towards a Conceptual Militancy for ZerO books. Mike has written regularly for Artforum, Frieze, Art Review, Radical Philosophy and Hyperallergic. He lectures at John Cabot University and The American University of Rome.

Minna Valjakka, Leiden University (NL)
Prof. dr. Minna Valjakka, is an art historian focusing on urban creativity and environmental art in East and Southeast Asian cities with an interdisciplinary approach. In January 2022, she joined Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) as Professor of Art History, specifically contemporary art history and theory in a global perspective. Her main research interests focus on artistic and creative practices in urban public space in East and Southeast Asia, and in relation to civil society formation. Through a locally-embedded long-term engagements at the interface of Art Studies, Urban Studies and Environmental Humanities, she examines urban creativity as a response to the distinctive trajectories of environmental issues, geopolitical circumstances, and translocal mediations. Prof. Valjakka has published extensively, including journal articles in Cultural Studies, City, Culture and Society, Urban Design International, and China Information, among others. She has also written book chapters, exhibition essays, and co-edited volumes, such as Visual Arts, Representations, and Interventions in Contemporary China. Urbanized Interface (AUP, 2018). Besides her academic work, she also collaborates with museums in terms of research exhibitions, talks and publications.

Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Slovak Academy of Sciences (SK)
Myrto Tsilimpounidi is a social researcher and photographer. Her research focuses on the interface between urbanism, culture, and innovative methodologies. She is the author of Sociology of Crisis: Visualising Urban Austerity (Routledge, 2016) and the co-editor of Remapping Crisis: A Guide to Athens (Zero Books, 2014) and Street Art & Graffiti: Reading, Writing & Representing the City (Routledge, 2017). Myrto is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences & the co-founder of the Autonomous Feminist Research Centre in Athens.

Pedro Soares Neves, University of Lisbon/Urban Creativity Conference/AP2 Open Access Journals (PT)
Pedro Soares Neves, 1976, is a multidisciplinary and post graduate academic training in Design and Urbanism (Lisbon, Barcelona and Rome). Urban designer and consultant of several municipality and national wide institutions in their approaches to informal visual signs production (Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Creativity). Experienced practitioner and academic, co-organizer of the Lisbon Street Art; Urban Creativity Conference and ongoing Scientific Journal and International Research Topic (Urbancreativity.org).

Peter Bengtsen, Lund University (SE)
Peter Bengtsen is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University. Since 2006 his research primarily focuses on street art as an artistic and social phenomenon. In 2014, he published his first book entitled The Street Art World. His most recent book, Street Art and the Environment (2018), discusses how art may influence the relationship between humans and nature. Since October 2018, Peter coordinates the interdisciplinary research network Urban Creativity Lund.

Sabina Andron, University of Melbourne (AU)
Sabina Andron is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. She works on urban visual culture, graffiti, and signage to examine the role of public images in urban citizenship and governance. She previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, where she received her Architectural History and Theory PhD in 2018. She is a co-founder of the Urban Surfaces Research Network.

Selina Miles, Specialist Video Adviser (AU)
Selina Miles is an Australian Director with a global reputation, having worked in over 20 countries across the world. In 2019, Miles made her feature debut with Martha: A Picture Story, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film received critical acclaim and won numerous awards, including the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival and Best Documentary Director at the ATOM Awards.

We are committed to the integrity of our peer-review process, which ensures the high quality of all articles in the Nuart Journal. Your paper will be initially assessed for suitability by the Editor. It will then be double blind peer-reviewed by two anonymous, independent, expert referees. At this point, you will receive feedback about your article and we will let you know if we would like any changes to your article made before publication. Reviewers’ comments are usually found to be very helpful by authors and a stronger article is often the result. Please note that the final acceptance of papers is at the Editor’s discretion.