The Boekman Dissertation Prize is awarded every three years to the best Dutch PhD research on art, culture and society. The prize, consisting of €10.000, is intended to publicize artistic and cultural research to a wide audience. To this end, the Dutch journal Boekman devotes one of its editions to the winning dissertation, the year following the presentation.

The prize is named after Emanuel Boekman. On June 6th 1939, he was the first person in the Netherlands to write his PhD thesis on the relationship between government and the arts.

Dr. Yosha Wijngaarden (Erasmus University Rotterdam) is the winner of the fifth Boekman Dissertation prize for art, culture and policy. Wijngaarden received her PhD in 2019 from her research Spaces of co-working: situating innovation in the creative industries. Wijngaarden focuses on the locations where the practice of creative workers develops at the micro-level: incubators, hubs, and creative collectives. What influence do the users of these spaces experience on their innovative capacity?

The jury consisting of Helleke van den Braber (Utrecht University), Xandra Schutte (De Groene Amsterdammer), Jan Baetens (KU Leuven), Araf Ahmadali (City of Amsterdam) and Olaf Velthuis (University of Amsterdam and chairman of the jury) chose the dissertation of Wijngaarden from 19 dissertations on the field of work of the Boekman Foundation as winner.

The other two nominees were Dr Kila van der Starre – Poetry off the page. The circulation and use of poetry (UU, 2021) and dr. Angela Bartholomew – Disruptive Attitudes: Artists Counter the Art of Exhibiting in the Low Countries (1985-1991) (VU, 2021).

All participating dissertations are included in the library collection.