Working across art-making and academia over three decades, Lachlan MacDowall is a scholar of graffiti, street art and digital culture, best known for pioneering research methods that mix genres, images and data.

He has published widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti, as well as on urban informality, public art, cultural policy and digital platforms. As a writer and photographer, he has pioneered new methods to register the complexity of graffiti and street art, including its rise as cultural heritage, challenges to documentation and photographic practices, the uses of bio-social paradigms, ficto-criticism, the analysis of data-rich environments and its connection to white supremacism and the alt-right. His work is widely cited and has been translated into French, Italian and Ukrainian.

His most recent book is Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era, published by Intellect and University of Chicago Press. He is currently Director of the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.