Sebastian Olma

Sebastian Olma is a writer and critic. He is contributing editor of the subculture magazine Amsterdam Alternative and serves as chairperson of the board of OT301. Recently, he’s co-founded the platform Vrij Beton (Free Concrete), a platform with the aim to liberate real estate from the market and turn it over to collective ownership of the many, not the few. 

Sebastian holds the research chair for Cultural and Creative Industries at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) at Avans University of Applied Sciences. He earned a PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2007 with a dissertation on the ontology of contemporary capitalism. Later, he worked as a researcher at Goldsmith, The Royal Dutch Academy of Science and the Institute of Network Cultures. As a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, he guided PhD researchers performing critical examinations of the creative industries. His professional experience as a policy advisor and consultant led him to the publication of In Defence of Serendipity (Repeater 2016), a book criticizing creative industries policies and exploring radical strategies of social innovation that transcend conventional definitions of creativity and innovation.

As professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, Olma has built a research group investigating the role artists, designers and cultural producers in general can play in developing the aesthetics and poetics of a desirable future. 

Sebastian regularly participates in public debates, trying to highlight the ideological traps for artistic and cultural production that are systematically set by the neoliberal city. In 2017, he was appointed an advisor to the Dutch Council for Culture.