Born and raised in Barcelona, Núria Arbonés Aran has lived and worked in several places before settling in The Netherlands. She has a master’s degree in Catalan Philology from the University of Barcelona, a Master's degree of Arts and a PhD degree of Urban Studies from the University of Amsterdam, European Studies. After her master studies in Amsterdam she remained at the University of Amsterdam as a full-time lector Catalan aiming to contribute to a broader international insight into a diversity of Catalan related matters. At UvA, she also got involved in the development of education and research on cultural perspectivism, images and history making.

Nowadays her professional environment is mainly concentrated at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences where she initiated the international educational programme International Virtual Consulting Firm (IVCF), working on real life cases in cooperation with partner institutions and business and institutional life in Barcelona and Paris. The IVCF is since 2010 implemented in the programme City Marketing in Europe in cooperation with CAREM and the multidisciplinary arrangement Urban Management and is currently further developed at AMSIB and CEDIS in the research programme Cities and Visitors and Visitors and Image Amsterdam Zuidoost. Her current professional interest lies in comparative studies, especially in the fields of (tribal) marketing, consumer behavior and places images, identity and reputation.

From 2010 to 2015 she combined the activities of a programme leader and lecturer in City Marketing in Europe with a PhD research that resulted in her thesis Capturing the Imaginary: Students and Other Tribes in Amsterdam. Her work proposes to keep combining different perspectives and disciplines and to keep searching for a better balance between the fugacity and speed inherent to our contemporary life, and the also very necessary craftsmanship and reflection of a more fundamental research.

Arbonés, Aran, N. "Capturing the Imaginary: Students and Other Tribes in Amsterdam." (University of Amsterdam-AUAS, 2015). PhD Dissertation

Arbonés, Aran, N. (2016) in Mamadouh, V. and Wageningen, van, A. (Ed.) Urban Europe. Fifty Tales of The City. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. English Edition.