9th Urban Creativity

Conference Speakers



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Nic Clear - Professor and Dean School of Arts & Humanities University of Huddersfield
Nic Clear is a qualified architect, writer and curator, and Professor and Acting Dean of School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. He was Professor of Architecture and Head of Department of Architecture and Landscape at University of Greenwich. Professor Clear joined the University of Greenwich in 2011 having taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture for over 20 years, where he was programme director of MArch Architecture. He was also history and theory co-ordinator of the Masters in Architectural Design, and has taught in the UK, Europe, US and Canada. In 2015 he was the Inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Fine Arts in Vienna.
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Hyun Jun Park - Course Director Architecture and 3D Design University of Huddersfield
Hyun Jun Park is a practitioner, writer, curator, and Lecturer in Architecture in the Department of Architecture and 3D Design at the University of Huddersfield. He is also Director of international development of Korea Institute of Ecological Architecture and Environment. He is working with Professor Nic Clear under the name of the advanced architecture research group, Clear + Park. He is a member of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group (AVATAR).

Philipp Schnell is an urban researcher, based in Salzburg and Vienna, teaching research design and academic writing. In his research he places a focus on Arts-Based and Qualitative Methods to discover urban life-worlds and expressions of urban subjectivity. He is interested in graphic methods for documenting city life and uses creative approaches for revealing facets of contemporary urbanity. He is a member of Sektion Stadtforschung at the Austrian Sociological Association (ÖGS) and has published texts in the fields of space theory, urban studies, and Arts-Based Research.

Photo by Tina Herzl






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​Andreas Duscha is a conceptual artist with a focus on analogue photography. He mainly works on topics such as time, architectural representations of power and creative strategies for urban critique and renewal. He studied Conceptual Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Psychology at the University of Vienna. Since 2021 he is teaching at the Institute of Photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He exhibits regularly in museums, foundations and international galleries and his work has been shown i.a. at Belvedere 21 Wien, Kunsthaus Zürich, ISCP New York, Manifesta, Rovereto, Biennale de Fin del Mundo (Ushuaia) and ACF Bratislava.
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Xenia Lesniewski is an ultra-contemporary, multidisciplinary artist from Vienna. Her work includes painting, installation, collaborative projects, performative situations as well as curatorial practice and urban planning. Lesniewski's oeuvre moves at the interface of art and life as well as within the examination of current social developments and public space. A process-oriented, interdisciplinary approach that plays with urban imaginaries to create and infiltrate liminal space guides her artistic practices, which are focusing on the re-appropriation and re-purposing of urban spaces.

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Valerie Messini is an independent digital artist, researcher, and registered architect. She holds a position as senior scientist at the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts as well as at the IKA (Institut für Kunst und Architektur) at the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Vienna. In 2017, she co-founded 2MVD, an artistic collaboration that focuses on combining architecture with innovations and advances in the field of digital art and technology. She is currently working on her PhD “void set – about emptiness in virtual space” supervised by Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Itai Margula is an architect, designer, exhibition designer and freelance curator with an office in Vienna. With his team he develops exhibition formats for museums, publications, and art books as well as individual design solutions and architectural projects. In 2018/2019 he attracted great attention with his scenography for the exhibition »Shrew Mummy in a Coffin and other Treasures« curated by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf. He worked as a designer for Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Fondazione Prada, MAK, Belvedere, Jewish Museum Wien, and the Secession. His works on visible and invisible urban realities were exhibited and published at the 11th Architecture Biennale in Venice.

photo credits: David Payr

Christine Koblitz, at the Wien Museum since 2010, works on the participatory connection of social media with exhibitions, curator "Takeover - Streetart & Skateboarding" (2019) and events (until 2020). Before that, from 2001 to 2010, cultural manager in the areas of theatre, cabaret and music, including for the Wienerlied duo Die Strottern.
photo: Georg Herder

Laima Nomeikaite - Roskilde University, Denmark/ University of South-Eastern Norway
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.

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Carolyn Loeb - Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University, Haslett, MI, USA
Carolyn Loeb is a historian of art and architecture. A founding RCAH faculty member, in addition to teaching she served as Director of Exhibition Spaces from 2007-2018 and as Associate Dean from 2011-2016
Carolyn’s research on public art and developments in housing in Berlin in the postwar and post-reunification periods has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and Public Art Dialogue, among other venues. Her book, The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin, was published in April 2022 by Bloomsbury.


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Martyn Reed
Martyn Reed is a renowned producer, curator and gallerist representing and working with some of the worlds leading Street and Urban Artists. He is the founder and curator of Norway’s Nuart Festival, regarded as the worlds leading Street Art Festival and is the owner of Reed Projects Gallery and Project Space.

Susan Hansen 
Susan Hansen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University, London and Chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group. She has research interests in communities' material engagements with, and affective responses to, street art and graffiti; in the analysis of graffiti as a form of visual dialogue; and in the promise of an archaeological approach to understanding street art and graffiti through the longitudinal photo documentation of single sites.

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Enrico Bonadio
Enrico Bonadio is Reader at The City Law School, where he teaches various modules on intellectual property (IP) law.
He holds law degrees from the University of Florence (PHD) and the University of Pisa (LLB), and is Associate Editor and Intellectual Property Correspondent of the European Journal of Risk Regulation as well as a member of the Editorial Board of NUART Journal.
His current research agenda focuses on copyright protection of unconventional forms of expression, including graffiti and street art. Enrico has recently co-edited the book "Non-Conventional Copyright - Do New and Non-Traditional Works Deserve Protection?" (together with Nicola Lucchi, Elgar 2018); and edited the "Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti" (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Siri-Helen Egeland - assistant professor at The University of Agder, Norway.
She teaches business- and IP-law and is working on a PhD with the title: “Issues on Copyright and Moral Rights in the intersections between visual art, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. A comparison between the current legal regulations in the EU, the UK, and the USA”. This project is partly funded by Sørlandets Art Museum and The Sørlandet Knowledge Foundation (SKF).

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Elena Calderon Alaez, Totemo.Art, Tokyo, Japan
Timeless Graffiti (remote)
Elena Calderon Alaez is an independent researcher of graffiti and street art. Flaneur nomad from Madrid. Graduated in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at Complutense University of Madrid. Active member of the group ST.A.CO (Street Art Conservators at TEI of Athens) during a Erasmus scholarship in Greece (course 2014-2015). Final project on conservation and restoration of works by the street art artist Eltono in Madrid. In 2017 finished a Master’s degree in Conservation and Exhibition of Contemporary Art at UPV in Bilbao. Final project on interventionist/appropriationist Urban Artists in Spain. Currently part of the Street Art Cities community, where documents murals from cities like Bilbao, Stockholm, Reykjavík, Maribor and Tokyo. Active member of urban art / graffiti researchers group in Spain: Urban Art Observatory with which published various articles in the online magazine MURAL Street Art Conservation. Based in Tokyo from 2020. Currently Chief Curator of Totemo NFT platform. 

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Mathieu Tremblin (1980) is a French artist, researcher and teacher. He implements simple and playful processes of action inspired by anonymous, autonomous and spontaneous practices and expressions in urban space in order to question the systems of legislation, representation and symbolization of the city. He has also been developing a PhD research about the links between independent art practices, urbanities and globalization linked to various formats of curation and publication. 
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Mattia Boscaino - Lecturer in Management at the Birmingham Business School - University of Birmingham
Lecturer at the University of Birmingham contributing to teaching and learning in different disciplines related to business management, entrepreneurship, research methods, and HRM. My expertise is in creative industries, complex social systems, labour organisation, and street art.


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Caroline Chapain - Lecturer in Mamagement at the Birmingham Business School - University of Birmingham
Caroline Chapain is a Lecturer in the Department of Management at the University of Birmingham whose area of specialty is regarding; Creativity, innovation, creative industries, and creative cities and regions, Economic restructuring, plant closures and redundancies, Local and regional economic development, Public policies (governance, cluster policy), and Quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

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Cameron McAuliffe - Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences of the Western Sydney University
Cameron McAuliffe is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences and part of the Geography and Urban Studies academic group. Prior to this position, Cameron was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Research (2007-2010).

Anna Bornioli - Senior Researcher at the Erasmus Centre of the Erasmus University Rotterdam
Anna Bornioli is a Senior Researcher in Transport Economics at the Erasmus Centre for Urban Ports and Transport Economics (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Her expertise is in wellbeing, transport and health, healthy and sustainable environments, active travel, and inclusive urban tourism. She is Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing (University of the West of England-Bristol).

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Malcolm Jacobson - Stockholm University, Department of Sociology, Sweden
He is a PhD student with a background as a photographer and book publisher. In his dissertation project he explores how adolescent participation in the graffiti subculture influences the life courses of individual. One of several tracks he follows is how participants in subcultures construct collective memories and identities through social media. Departing in cultural sociology he employs mixed methods combining network analysis and visual sociology. His research interests include the production of meaning, valuation, subcultures, the sociology of generations, intersectionality and masculinity, as well as the relation between art, economy, and criminality. He holds an MA in sociology from Stockholm University and a BA in philosophy from Södertörn University.
Outside academia, he has been working as a documentary photographer since the 1990s and has published eleven books about topics such as subcultures and minorities. He is co-founder of the Swedish graffiti magazine Underground Productions and founder of the publishing house Dokument Press, an international publisher based in Sweden acknowledged for its books on urban culture, photography, and contemporary art.

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Ulrich Blanché - Heidelberg University, art history, Heidelberg, Germany

Ulrich Blanché is postdoc in art history at University of Heidelberg. He is a Street Art researcher since 2006. His dissertation »Konsumkunst - Kultur & Kommerz bei Banksy & Damien Hirst« was translated in two parts into English in 2016 and 2018. He further focuses on the image of monkeys since Darwin, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst and Young British Artists.

Tom Ward - Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Tom is a graduate research student at the University of Cambridge, with research interests in the complexity of relations between art, law and the city. He was the recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s Political Geography Research Group dissertation prize in 2021 for his first dissertation, ‘Navigating (Il)legal Art’, while his current thesis examines the legal technicalities of commissioning public art in West London.

Alexander Cuntz heads the Creative Economy Section of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) based in Geneva. Before joining WIPO, he worked as a senior consultant at the Federal Expert Commission for Research and Innovation (EFI) based in Berlin and as a research fellow at the European Commission based in Seville. Mr. Cuntz’s economic research focuses on creativity and the role of copyright as well as the impact of digitization. 


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Matthias Sahli (WIPO and University of Neuchâtel)
Matthias Sahli is a PhD-Candidate (economics) at the University of Neuchâtel and a full-time research fellow at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He holds a MSc in economics from the University of Bern and previously has been working as an economist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. His interest lies in topics relevant to intellectual property and economics and his current research deals with the empirical analysis and effects of intellectual property rights in the creative economy. 

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Alessio Muscarnera ​

Gérini Christian. Researcher in philosophy and art history, specialist in contemporary arts and more specifically in street art, Christian Gerini has published articles in scientific journals and books as well as in general public journals on street art such as Street Art Magazine. His sociological and anthropological approach of graffiti and street art can be seen in a one-hour documentary he made in 2021 for the online television TV CultureGnum (https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/culturegnum). He is an Associate researcher at the IMSIC/CREAMED laboratory (University of Toulon, France) and president of the association Nouvelles Mémoires (Arts, heritage, scientific culture, street art). 

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Vittorio Parisi, Villa Arson School of Visual Arts, Nice, France
The Aesthetic Dimension of Ruins in Italian Street Art (local)
Vittorio Parisi holds a doctorate in Aesthetics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and is currently in charge of studies and research at the Villa Arson school of visual arts in Nice. His research activity focuses on the relationship between art and urban non-places, as well as on the relationship between street art, the institutional world of art and the cultural industry. 
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Silvia Scrdapane - Inward - National Observatory on Urban Creativity, Naples, Italy 
Silvia Scardapane born in 1989 in Naples, graduated with honors in Archeology and History of Art at the Federico II University of Naples with a thesis entitled "Demythification of mural art: from the first evidence of independence to the new muralism in Italy". Urban art scholar, whose movement she interviewed numerous exponents, especially for the contemporary art magazine Racna Magazine, since 2015 she has worked with INWARD National Observatory on Urban Creativity and since 2021 she coordinates its activities.

Monica Mongelli - Arts and Cultural Heritage Graduate from the University of Federico II of Naples
Monica Mngelli was born in 1996 and she graduated in Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Naples “Federico II” discussing a thesis entitled “New paradigms of Urban Art: from Augmented Reality to NFTs”. She has collaborated for one year with Inward - National Observatory of Urban Creativity and she currently is involved as an external collaborator of the Italian group “Collettivo Zero” and “AIGU CAMPANIA”.


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Xing (Dominic) Chen

Marina Štambuk - Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Sofia Varino, University of Potsdam, Berlin, Germany
Sofia Varino, Ph.D., is a writer and cultural historian based in Berlin. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the MINOR COSMOPOLITANISMS research training group at the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Potsdam.

Zahar Hela -  Associate Professor, Digital Culture Studies, Université de l'Ontario français (UOF), Toronto, Canada

Anton Polsky is an artist, activist, independent researcher, cofounder of Partizaning platform, author of publications and university courses on the history and theory of street art. He was born and currently lives in Moscow. 

Javier Abarca
Javier Abarca (Madrid 1973) 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.
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Tuba Doğu - Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Andrea Lorenzo Baldini - Alliance University, School of Liberal Arts, Bangalore, India
Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the School of Arts of Nanjing University, Director of the NJU Center for Sino-Italian Cultural Studies, and Young Ambassador of the Jiangsu Province. Board Member of the Association of Italian Scholars in China (AAIIC), and Board and Founding Member of the Association of Tuscans in China. He has been recently elected Delegate-at-Large of the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA). 
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Crismary Ospina Gallego - Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Manizales, Colombia








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Isabel Carrasco - Marist College, Madrid, Spain
Isabel Carrasco Castro, PhD in Aesthetics, 2013, has developed a twofold professional career in the field of International Education as a lecturer and as an administrator. As an adjunct professor, she teaches Calligraphy at Universidad Nebrija. She is also the Program Director for Marist College Madrid.

María Fernanda López Jaramillo

Ana Gariso - ICNOVA - FCSH UNL, Lisboa, Portugal

Diana Shepherd, Denver, USA/ Galway, Ireland
She is a freelance artist based at Derby Arboretum Park. She divides her time between fine art, design, and community projects.   Her own work is primarily drawing based using charcoal and inks. She believes that undertaking artists' residencies both nationally and internationally are a great way to create new work and experience other cultures. This aspect of my working life has led me to work in partnership with the park manager and create artists residency opportunities in the Arboretum Orangery.

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​Ye (Sherry) Liu
Sherry Liu (Chinese, b.1994), is an emerging young artist, is focusing on social engagement practices. Born in Eastern China in a historical city, Xuzhou, Sherry has expressed a keen interest in culture and history from her childhood, and this also can be found in her works.  She studied fine art and public art between 2012 and 2016 at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology in Shanghai, exploring multiple art and design practices around Shanghai and Jiangsu province. For example, in 2014, she integrated the Han culture into the brand design for a corporation in her hometown. In 2016, she combined with social practice and traditional handicrafts techniques to explore her work ‘the use of uselessness, and this work finally be collected by Wison Art Museum.  In 2017, she moved to Sydney and studied in the Master of Art at UNSW and then in 2018 transferred to Melbourne to study Art in Public Space at RMIT.

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Wilson Yeung Chun Wai
Wilson Yeung Chun Wai is an independent curator and artist. He is a research fellow at the Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia (LCI) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain (2018). He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture and Design and a member of the Contemporary Art, Society and Transformation (CAST) Research Group at the RMIT University. He held the position as research assistant at the University Art Gallery in Sydney University Museum. He holds a Master of Art Curating in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney and a Bachelor Degree of Arts (Fine Art) with distinction awarded by the RMIT University. His PhD research Curating the In- Between: Rethinking and Reinventing Contemporary Curatorial Practices focuses on rethinking the traditional role of the curator and curatorial process.

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