Meet the Researchers

Marta Połeć

My interest in street performances began in 2012 with ethnographic fieldwork for my bachelor's thesis in management. I accidentally encountered street performers in the old town during my student exchange in Cracow. At that time, regulations for street performers were introduced, garnering the broader attention of the performers' community, urban space users, and media creators, which revealed an original, dynamically changing research topic.

I view street performances as organised cultural activities within urban environments. Such an approach includes various forms of performative street art, such as theatre, circus, music, dance, and visual arts. Over more than a decade of fieldwork, my focus has moved form informal street performances to street festivals, where the same street performances are integrated into formal organisational structures.

I am currently writing a book presenting street performances as a diverse, universal phenomenon, which is part of the careers of many performers and organisers of cultural activities. The book considers alternative organisations, organisational aesthetics, and humanistic management concepts. It will feature an ethnographic description of how street performances are organised in Polish and European cities. Moreover, it will outline the typical activities associated with organising street performances in different organisational contexts. The book will also detail the life cycles of street performances and street festivals, and highlight the typical career paths of street performers and festival organisers.

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Kozminski University in Warsaw, Poland. I am a principal investigator of a research project: 'Organizational Ethnography of Festivals of Street Performers' (2021–2025, National Science Centre, Poland). I am a laurate of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education scholarship for outstanding achievements, and the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage scholarship.

Nick Broad

Nick Broad is one of the world's leading busking experts. After moving in with a phenomenal New York subway violinist, in 2008 Broad began riding his bike around Manhattan filming the buskers he came across and publishing videos online. This passion for documenting the art form led to a round-the-world film trip in 2011, when he filmed and interviewed street performers in 30 countries on 5 continents, producing a coffee-table book and hundreds of YouTube videos with millions of views.

In 2014 'The Busking Project CIC' launched, a nonprofit devoted to solving the technological needs of street performers, which he co-founded with his life, Liliana Maz. Their website, busk.co, is used daily by over a thousand street performers worldwide to collect tips during street shows (and will be part of the marketing plan for this book).

Over the last two decades, Broad has: launched buskers.guide, a living archive of street performance that gets the world's busking activities and advocates working together; been a founding member and industry partner of the Street Music Research Unit, a collaboration of the few economists, musicologists and other academics who are actually taking an interest in busking; presented his own research into busking policy at a UN Habitat conference aimed at urbanists; helped advocates with legal battles over the right to busk in public spaces in Berlin, Boston, Galway, London, Melbourne, New York and multiple other cities; and his writing and work has been covered in publications like the BBC, ITV, CNN, the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, NME and dozens of other publications.

He has almost two decades working in multiple areas associated with street performance – as event booker, festival producer, fintech platform entrepreneur, researcher, organiser, activist and community leader. He now lives with his wife Liliana Maz, and their dog, Pisco. He is currently working on a book, How Buskers Changed the World, about the cultural impact street performers have on society.