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. 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, the analysis of data-rich environments and its connection to white supremacism and the alt-right.

He has published widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti and street art, including in his most recent books Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era (2019) published by Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press and (with Kylie Budge) Art After Instagram: Art Spaces, Audiences, Aesthetics (2022) published by Routledge. His work has been translated into French and Italian. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia and a Senior Research Fellow (Hon) in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.