Nicoletta Grillo is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the UHasselt Faculty of Architecture and Arts. Active as both an artist and researcher, she is a member of MARGES, an interdisciplinary research group that explores the productive overlap between art and architecture through creative and critical practices including writing, drawing, photography, and moving images.
She teaches in the Master of Adaptive Reuse, as well as in the Bachelor's programmes in Architecture and Interior Architecture. Her teaching portfolio includes spatial (re)presentations, artistic workshops, and the use of diverse media, including photography, video, collage, and drawing, as tools for observation, imagination, and critical inquiry.
In 2022, she obtained a joint PhD in Urban Studies and Art History from Politecnico di Milano and KU Leuven. Her doctoral research examined forms of representations of border landscapes through photography as contemporary art. More broadly, her research investigates how photography, moving images, and artistic practices can offer alternative ways of understanding and representing places shaped by social, environmental, and geopolitical transformations.
Her current work focuses on liminal territories and coastal environments, particularly within the emerging field of the Blue Humanities. Through both theoretical and practice-based research, she explores landscapes shaped by human mobility, environmental change, and the entanglement of land and sea. Recent artistic projects developed through fieldwork in Southern Italy and along the Belgian coast have been presented in exhibitions, screenings, and installation formats. Another line of research examines experimental historical modes of representation in architecture. She also engages with the intersections of photography, feminism, and everyday space, investigating how broader socio-political dynamics are articulated through, and emerge from, personal experience.
She is the author of Photography and Invisible Borders: Spaces of Imagination between Switzerland and Italy (Brill, 2024), which combines a critical investigation of the borderscape notion and spatial theory with a photo-textual travelogue based on fieldwork in the Swiss Italian border landscape, focusing on dynamics of cross-border labour and migration. Her recent publications include Re-membering the Coast: Three Environmental Art Trails (with Joeri Verbesselt and Hilde Van Gelder, Vesper, 2026), Vertical Horizon: Geologies of Mobility Along the Coast Between Sicily and Calabria (Krill Books, 2026), Approaches to Adaptive Reuse through the “Drawing-Collage”: Representation Tactics as Learning Tools for Architecture (with Saidja Heynickx, Trace, 2026).
Before joining UHasselt, she was a postdoctoral researcher at LUCA School of Arts and a lecturer at KU Leuven. Her educational background combines architecture, photography, and music. She holds a Master's degree in Architecture (Politecnico di Milano, 2016), and additional qualifications in photography (CFP Bauer, Milan, 2017) and classical music (Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano, 2013).
She is a member of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (KU Leuven and UCLouvain), and of the artist cooperative Level Five in Brussels.
