Dobroslawa Nowak is the founder of offseen, a global contemporary art app, as well as the founder and editor-in-chief of The Italian Art Guide, a digital platform dedicated to promoting contemporary art in Italy. Dobroslawa is a multilingual writer with over a decade of experience. She has written, edited, and translated for more than 40 international outlets, most of which focus on contemporary art and culture. She has also been quoted in major publications such as Women’s Health US, Bustle, and GO Banking Rates.

Dobroslawa holds a Master of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Photography and attended a seminar in art curation at the Brera Academy in Milan. Her background spans art curation, editorial and media work, and digital marketing with a focus on strategic communication and audience growth.

For PR ON THE GO, Dobroslawa shares the journey of building her art startup.

You founded both offseen and the Italian Art Guide - both two platforms aiming to reshape how audiences engage with art. What unites these projects under your broader vision for connecting people to contemporary art?

Dobroslawa Nowak: As a baseline, both projects were born from the desire to spread the word about contemporary art. During my first years in Italy, I visited numerous exhibitions that had no outlet to reach a wider audience beyond private Instagram feeds. I started an account to share the exhibitions I attended, and within a few weeks, I began receiving invitations and direct message requests to feature more shows. I then created an email to manage these requests, and last year we launched a website with a submission form, allowing the platform to grow naturally. Along the way, I was joined by talented collaborators, and working consistently together, we developed a larger, more recognizable portal, even being invited to serve as media partners for art fairs. Honestly, I wouldn’t say we did anything extraordinary besides being persistent and consistent—there was simply a huge demand.

With offseen, my motivation is more personal. Having traveled extensively in recent years, I often found it challenging to arrive in a new city and discover a contemporary art exhibition I would genuinely enjoy. Googling rarely helps—it’s often inaccurate, outdated, or both, and there is no single source that reliably tells you what’s available and worth seeing everywhere. That’s when I started developing a system to solve this problem. For this project, I’m also fortunate to work with a fantastic international team.

offseen operates at an intersection between art, technology and storytelling. How do you perceive digital media transforming the way audiences discover and experience exhibitions today?

Dobroslawa Nowak: I grew up with magazines—they were my window to the world, and I always devoured them with delight. For some reason, television never worked for me the same way. With the arrival of the internet, everything changed. I feel that paper editions have now become beautiful objects, a form of celebration, and should be reserved for materials intended to endure. As nostalgic as journals and paper magazines are for me, I believe we should reconsider printing them in such large numbers.

Digital media, on the other hand, opens doors for thousands of galleries and artists around the world. News—even about short-lived, ephemeral exhibitions—can now spread in seconds globally. If I could turn back time, I would have loved to experience traditional media every day. But today, refusing to embrace the speed and convenience of digital media—not to mention its smaller environmental footprint—is simply being oblivious.

There is no danger that seeing exhibitions online will deter people from visiting them, although I’ve heard this concern from gallerists a few times. Audiences still attend exhibitions; the in-person experience is an entirely different kind of engagement.

As a founder coming from an art-media background, how do you balance technological innovation with preserving artistic authenticity and cultural depth?

Dobroslawa Nowak: For me, there is no opposition; these topics go hand in hand. Technological innovation is simply a tool that allows me to do whatever I set out to do. I have never encountered any limitations in this regard.

What does collaboration look like between offseen and curators, institutions, or artists - and how do these partnerships influence the platform’s growth?

Dobroslawa Nowak: Art operators are invited to collaborate with our platform by submitting shows—that is, adding a pin to the map corresponding to an upcoming or ongoing exhibition. The galleries and artists presence on the map lies at the very heart of the initiative, making their participation highly sought-after. We collaborate with several media outlets from our industry and aim to team up with more to serve as first-line selectors. While the submission process is simple, we uphold editorial standards that benefit from the professional insight of these platforms. Partnering with sponsors is another avenue we are eager to develop. Naturally, both media outlets and individuals are encouraged to help share the word about offseen.

Looking ahead, what’s your long-term vision for offseen - both as a business but also as a cultural movement?

Dobroslawa Nowak: offseen is easy to use, polished, and the typical app’s abundance of options is intentionally downplayed. I deliberately chose not to include ads and aim to populate the map as efficiently as possible, as this is the best way to make it genuinely useful for everyone. My next goal is to expand beyond Europe and the US, where we have already begun gaining traction, along with engaging potential market scouts. I want the app to be truly global, providing a comprehensive view of art tendencies—all in one place. It’s interconnected: the more exhibitions we showcase, the more valuable it becomes for users, and the more it grows—each fueling the other.

How do you help artists and audiences overcome gatekeepers in the art world?

Dobroslawa Nowak: It’s an interestingly framed question. While I believe that every artwork created today deserves to be given a chance to be seen and experienced by an audience, all the projects I have been involved in—from exhibition curation to organizing art residencies and editorial work—have always, rightly, started with a selection process.
Creativity and freedom of expression are always welcome, but art demands a tremendous amount of work and dedication; even the simplest works are often the result of decades of study.
The only way to overcome gatekeepers—if we view them as those who don’t benefit artists—is to give artists a fair opportunity to showcase the quality, coherence, and standards of their work.

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