Jury

Maria Cristina Vannini started her versatile and extensive career as an archaeologist under the Archaeological Superintendence of Lombardy, Veneto and Piedmont. This was followed by several marketing and freelance research projects for international companies such as L’Oreal and Unilever. In 2004 she founded soluzionimuseali-ims, a consultancy for museums to assist in assessments, projects management and marketing. In this capacity she has advised and managed a plethora of museum-related projects, including conferences, exhibitions, training and summer schools. These include training and consultancy for the Valtellina Museum System to achieve national museum quality standards, the organisation of the international conference “How to defend the heritage of humanity – how to protect cultural heritage” at the Milan Universal EXPO2015 site and the organisation and coordination of the Summer School OfficinaLedro. In addition, she also gives lectures as an adjunct professor in Museum Studies at the IULM University in Milan. Maria Vannini sits in the European Museum Forum Trust, and is a member of Fondo Ambiente Italiano, of Italia Nostra, and of ICOM. She holds a master’s degree in Classics and Archaeology from the University of Milan, with a thesis on “The Golasecca phases I and II in the village of Como, loc. Pay – via Isonzo”.

Hanna Kristiina Lämsä is the Executive Director of the Association of Cultural Heritage Education in Finland. She graduated with a master’s degree in Political Sciences from the University of Helsinki. This was paired with academic studies at the Università degli studi di Firenze, Université Paul Valery, Montpellier, and the University of Turku. Her professional career started at the National Board of Education, where she was a producer / web-editor. This was followed by various positions at the Association of Cultural Heritage Education in Finland, NGO, where she gradually went from being a secretary, to project officer, and finally to executive director. In 2018 she headed a project for the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Hanna Kristiina Lämsä has published an article in the Annual book of Finnish Local Heritage Federation, and has remained active on various blogs and webfora, providing commentaries and statements on policy in the field of culture. In her capacity as executive director and projects officer, she has managed various cultural projects, most of them aimed at engaging the youth with cultural heritage. One of them, Cultural Leap: Educational Programme, won the Grand Prix of the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards in 2018. She holds membership of the European Heritage Days Working group, the Board of Europa Nostra Finland, as well as a vice-membership of the National Committee on Sustainable Development (Prime Minister’s office). Her expertise covers cultural sustainability, education and learning, youth engagement, and policy-making.

Elisabetta Airaghi is a senior consultant and researcher at KEA. Elisabetta has more than 8 years’ experience in European Affairs and project management. At KEA, her responsibilities mostly focus on cultural heritage policy. Elisabetta is KEA project manager for the H2020 project ILUCIDARE (2018-ongoing) which aims to raise awareness and implement capacity building activities linking heritage with innovation and international cultural relations. She is also KEA principal researcher in the study “Material Cultural Heritage as a Strategic Territorial Development Resource: Mapping Impacts Through a Set of Common European Socio-economic Indicators” for ESPON (2018-ongoing).
Elisabetta has also been involved in other pan-European research projects such as the study “Towards an integrated vision for the European Digital Media Sector” for the European Commission – DG CNCT (2018) and the study “Mapping the Creative Value Chains – A Study on the Economy of Culture in the Digital Age” for the European Commission – DG EAC (2017).
Before joining KEA, Elisabetta worked as EU Project Manager in Brussels-based consulting companies for more than 5 years. She also gained first-hand experience in working within cultural organisations in Italy including at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy). She obtained a Bachelor in Economics and Management of Arts, Culture and Communication and a Master in Economics and Management of Public Administrations and International Institutions from Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). Elisabetta speaks Italian, English, French and she has a good command of Spanish. She is a member of the Jury of the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes.

Prof. Alex Torpiano is an architect and structural engineer by training, with a specialisation in masonry structures. He is currently Dean of the Faculty for the Built Environment, and Head of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. In 1994, he set up, and directed, the Institute for Masonry and Construction Research up to 2009, when it became the Department of Conservation and Built Heritage within the same Faculty. Between 1994 and 1996, he was a member of the Prehistoric Temples Technical Experts Committee. During this period, he was entrusted with the restoration of the Mnajdra, Hagar Qim, and Ggantija Prehistoric Temple complexes, following a series of collapses. He subsequently led a team of evaluators of the structural condition of the four major temple sites in Malta and Gozo, and co-authored a report which subsequently led to the erection of protection shelters on three of those sites.
In 1988, when he set up what is now a leading architectural and structural engineering practice in Malta, TBA Periti. Between 2000 and 2012, he led aoM partnership, a practice responsible for the Manoel Island and Tigne’ Point Redevelopment Project. He has worked on many projects involving the restoration of heritage masonry structures, as well as a number of local parish churches.
Prof. Torpiano is the Executive President of Din l-Art Helwa, a member organisation of Europa Nostra since 1967.

Alessandra Peruzzetto is the Program Specialist for Archaeology and the Middle East at the World Monuments Fund. She is responsible for a range of project activities and fundraising actions particularly in Jordan, Iraq, Oman and Yemen, focused on site management planning (Qalhat; Bat, Al Ain and Al Khutm; Babylon; Qusayr ‘Amra), site preservation, interpretation, World Heritage issues (Babylon; Qalhat), and training on cultural heritage conservation and management. Specialised in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Torino, prior to World Monuments Fund, she excavated at Hatra in Iraq and in Turkmenistan. In Jordan, she worked for the Institut Français du Proche-Orient and for the Petra National Trust/Department of Antiquities. In 2013, she consulted with the High Commission for Erbil Citadel Revitalization for assistance in the preparation of the Erbil Citadel Nomination File and in 2014 with the UNESCO Iraq Office for the Marshlands Nomination File. With Ars Progetti, she worked for the preparation of the Erbil Citadel Interpretation Plan in 2014-2015 and for the Master Plan of Mezyad Desert Park in Al Ain. She is member of the Jury of the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes.

Uwe Koch was born in Berlin. He is a graduate in Sociology from the Humboldt University Berlin. Before his appointment of 1 June 2015 as head of the German Cultural Heritage Board he held different senior positions in the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture of the state of Brandenburg since 1991. From 2002 he directed the Department of historic monuments, memory culture and museums in the state of Brandenburg.
Uwe Koch has 25 years of experience in government administration for cultural heritage. He was the German coordinator for the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018.

Androula Vassiliou was born and raised in Cyprus. She studied Law and International Affairs in London.
She practiced Law for 25 years. She was elected member of the Cyprus House of Representatives for two consecutive terms (1996-2006) and served on various parliamentary committees. She represented The Cyprus Parliament at the IPU and the ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’. In March 2008, she became member of the European Commission responsible for Health, a position she held until February 2010.
In March 2010 she was reappointed to the European Commission and was entrusted with the portfolio of Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, a position she held until October 2014.
Back to Cyprus, she had been re-appointed Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Cyprus Oncology Centre, a position she held until recently. She is the Chair of the Bi-Communal Technical Committee on Culture and a member of the Board of CVAR. She is a member of the High Council of the European University Institute of Florence and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Cyprus Institute of Research and Education.
Her mother tongue is Greek. She speaks English fluently and has sufficient knowledge of French. She has received the following honors: ‘The Grand Cross of the Order of Benefaction’ from the Hellenic Republic, she was named ‘Commander of the Order of the Arts and the Letters’ by the French Republic in 2015 and in January 2016 she received from the Prime Minister of Spain ‘the Grand Cross of ‘Alfonso X el Sabio’ at a special ceremony at the Prado museum. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Dimitri Cantemir University of Romania; on 19 September 2019, at a special event at St James’s Palace in London, she was honored by the Global Heritage Fund, along with 3 other women, from other regions of the world, as ‘Women Leaders in the field of heritage’. She is married to Dr George Vassiliou, former President of the Republic of Cyprus and has three children.

Joanna Sanetra-Szeliga (Poland), PhD in Economics, is a graduate of the Cracow University of Economics, majoring in European studies. She has been a coordinator of the Culture
2000 programme in Poland (2003-2005) and in the European Affairs Unit in the Department of Culture Strategy and European Affairs in the Ministry of Culture. Currently, she is
an assistant professor at the Cracow University of Economics (UNESCO Chair in Heritage and Urban) and a deputy chief of the Research Institute for European Heritage at the International Cultural Centre in Kraków. She is also a consultant in the Centre for Cultural Statistics of the Statistical Office in Kraków. She is an author and an editor of publications on European Capitals of Culture, the socio-economic potential of heritage, links between culture and heritage and development, as well as intercultural dialogue and EU cultural policy. She is member of the Jury of the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes.

Dubravka Preradović is an art historian, researcher and curator. She holds her BA in History of Art (2000), and MA in Medieval History Art and Architecture from Faculty of Philosophy (2008), University of Belgrade and her PhD in History and Archeology of Byzantine world from Università degli studi di Udine and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris (2011) with a Doctoral Scholarship from the Italian Government. In 2005, she completed the specialization “Nuove tecnologie per la valorizzazione e gestione del patrimonio culturale meditteraneo” at the European Centre for Cultural Monuments in Ravello, Italy. Dubravka worked as curator at the National Museum in Belgrade from 2001-2013, first as a curator at the Gallery of Frescoes, then as Curator in Medieval Department and then as a Senior Curator of the Collection of old and rare documents of medieval monuments. She has been a desk reviewer for the World Heritage Unit, ICOMOS, for the nomination of “Sacral Complex on the Remains of the Roman Forum in Zadar, Croatia” for the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2013.
As an expert in medieval art she has been particularly dedicated to the phenomena of the “cross-roads”: she studied the Byzantine period with focus on Latin influenced Adriatic and Serbian medieval churches with a strong Western impact. An important field of her research is dedicated to the phenomena of medieval societies and the politics of the cult of saints and relics. In parallel, she has been working on the historiography of cultural institutions and explorations of the medieval heritage of the Balkans at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and particularly on the presence of the French and Russian scholars in the Balkan area. She is alumna of the Ecole Française de Rome and the Plato Academy of the University of Athens. At the moment, she is an independent scholar, situated in Lyon, France. Her articles, covering different subjects in a vast chronological span, from the 4th to 20th centuries, are published in four languages in diverse scientific journals and monographies. Dubravka is fluent in English, French and Italian, and has a basic knowledge of Greek.

Attilio Petruccioli is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Dean of the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. From 1994 to 1998 he was the Aga Khan Professor of Design for Islamic Societies at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2012-2013 he was the Msheireb Property Chair at Qatar University.
Professor Petruccioli worked to transform, by design, a small academic institution in Southern Italy into one of the main international research centres for the study of traditional urban environments and the application of modern information technologies to their physical restoration and social revitalization. As a result of his long lasting and passionate interest, he has written and edited more than 32 books on the topics of architectural design and the history of Islamic architecture. His research interests are the methodology of design (landscape and contextual design, typological research and the work of modern architects), traditional settlements and housing, Islamic architecture, town and territory and Mediterranean landscape architecture.