The tenth edition capped a decade that grew from a bold vision into one of Australia’s most celebrated street-art events.
As documented in the BSAF archive — the festival program reached wider still
The 2025 Brisbane Street Art Festival was a landmark edition, marking the event's tenth anniversary and a full decade of turning the city into a vibrant, living canvas. Staged across nine days from 10 to 18 May, the festival arrived not as a fledgling experiment but as a defining fixture of Brisbane's cultural calendar. What began as a grassroots vision to transform the city's urban landscape had, by 2025, become one of Australia's most celebrated public art events, its footprint stretching from laneways and underpasses to entire precincts and leaving behind a permanent legacy of world-class murals that continue to shape the character of Brisbane's neighbourhoods.
True to form, the program spread fresh large-scale work across many of the city's most recognisable locations, including Northshore, Spring Hill, the CBD, Fish Lane, DFO Brisbane and the Midtown Centre. The Superordinary warehouse arts space at Northshore once again served as the festival's central hub, hosting live painting, artist showcases and the bulk of the events and workshops program. The artist line-up drew together significant local talent and visiting names alike, among them Leans, Carley Cornelissen, Fintan Magee, Sofles, Dean Tyson, Rossella RZ and Simon Degroot, who joined dozens of others in adding new works to Brisbane's ever-expanding open-air gallery.
Two signature initiatives gave the anniversary edition its distinctive edge. The festival hosted the Australian return of Meeting of Styles, the world-renowned international graffiti initiative, in its first-ever Brisbane iteration, a free two-day gathering on 10 and 11 May that brought together around 40 local and international graffiti artists in a celebration that paid respect to the roots of the movement. Alongside it, BSAF staged the inaugural Brisbane/Meanjin Paste Up Festival, championing paste-up as one of the most democratic forms of street art and cementing the festival's reputation for pushing the medium in new and exciting directions.
The wider program kept the community at its centre. A tenth-anniversary launch party at Superordinary on 10 May opened proceedings with live music, performances and artist showcases, while a hands-on workshop schedule invited the public into the practice through aerosol masterclasses, graffiti lettering, sticker art, calligraphy and collage. Street art cycling tours rounded out the offering, guiding audiences between sites and underscoring the festival's enduring belief in the power of public art to connect communities, inspire creativity and reimagine what a city can look like.