Dr. Sheng Kuan Chung, a graduate of the University of Illinois's School of Art and Design, has established himself as a prominent scholar in art education with over 80 published academic articles. His scholarly excellence has been recognized with three prestigious national awards from the National Art Education Association and the United States Society for Education through Art including the National 2014 Ziegfeld Award by the United States Society for Education Through Art (USSEA), the 2019 J. Eugene Grigsby, Jr. Award, and the 2025 AACIG Distinguished Scholar Award of NAEA. As an editor for the International Journal of Education through Art and Editor-in-Chief of Arts & Communication, he shapes academic discourse in art and visual culture education.

Dr. Chung's research investigates the integration of emerging digital technologies in art education and visual culture, with a focus on developing innovative and effective learning experiences in the post-pandemic landscape. His work also encompasses Asian aesthetics and cultural studies within art education and visual culture contexts. His multifaceted cross-disciplinary research agenda has positioned him as influential in advancing theoretical frameworks and practical applications in contemporary art education.

Well-known contemporary artist, art education expert and professor.

Vice Chairman of the China Social Art Association of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Executive Dean of the Academy of Painting of Central University of Finance and Economics. Chairman of the Expert Committee of Art Communication of Communication University of China, Dual-appointed Professor of Renmin University of China, Executive Director of the Art and Law Research Center of the Law School, Deputy Director and Researcher of the Art Law Research Center of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Distinguished Professor of the School of Art of Xiamen University. Art Consultant of Poly International Auction, National First-Class Art Appraiser. Former tutor of the Contemporary Painting and Calligraphy Masters Mentoring Class of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, Director of the Education Committee of the Renaissance Research Institute of Renmin University of China, and member of the Art Evaluation Committee of the Ministry of Culture.

Damián Keller is an Associate Professor of Music Technology at the Federal University of Acre and the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil. He is a cofounder of the international research network Ubiquitous Music Group and a founding member of the Amazon Center for Music Research (NAP). He has published over two hundred articles on ubiquitous music and ecologically grounded creative practice in journals on information technology, design, education, philosophy and the arts. 

Leigh Landy holds a Research Chair at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) where he directs the Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity (MTI²). His work is divided between creative and musicological endeavour. His compositions, many of which are sample-based, include several for video, dance and theatre and have been performed around the globe. He has worked extensively with the late playwright, Heiner Müller, the new media artist, Michel Jaffrennou and the composer-performer, Jos Zwaanenburg and was composer in residence for the Dutch National Theatre during its first years of existence. With Evelyn Jamieson, he directed Idée Fixe – Experimental Sound and Movement Theatre. His publications focus primarily on the studies of electroacoustic music. He directs the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) projects and is a founding director of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS).

Zhao Li, Vice Dean of the School of Art Management and Education at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA); Vice Dean of the Sino-French Art and Design Management Institute at CAFA; Vice Dean of the Art and Technology Research Institute at CAFA; Deputy Director of the National Art and Policy Institute at CAFA; Director of the Art Market Research Center at CAFA; Director of the Art Therapy Research Center at CAFA; Vice Chair of the Cultural Industry Committee of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles; Chair of the China Chapter of the Global Art Market Studies Association; Second-Level Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Postdoctoral Mentor. He also serves as a Researcher at the China National Academy of Painting, a Distinguished Researcher at Peking University, a Researcher at the Art Finance Research Center of Tsinghua University’s PBC School of Finance, and a Researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence Production Technology and Systems. Professor Zhao is a recipient of the National Teaching Materials Award, the Ministry of Education’s Social Science Award, and the Beijing Distinguished Teaching Award. He was a co-curator of the China Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Wu Ronghua is the Executive Vice Dean and Professor of the School of Arts at Xiamen University, specializing in sculpture creation and research. He graduated from Xiamen University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese Painting and a Master of Arts degree in Sculpture. He is a member of the China Artists Association and the China Sculpture Institute, among other organizations. His sculptures have been exhibited in national exhibitions, including the 10th, 11th, and 13th National Art Exhibitions, and many of his figure sculptures are displayed outdoors.

Artist, Curator, Professor in China Academy of Art.

Director of Zhejiang Environmental Artists Association, member of German Artists Association, member of Berlin New Artists Association, and director of Berlin Art and Philosophy Association. From 1986 to 2002, he studied and graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Department of Kassel University in Germany, and the Graduate School of Art Context of Berlin University of the Arts.

Xi Mu was born in Weinan, Shaanxi Province in 1966. He is the President and Researcher of the China Academy of Art Economics (Li Keran Painting Academy), Vice President, Professor, and Doctoral Supervisor of the China Academy of Art Industry (Shanghai University), Director of the Expert Committee of the Key Laboratory of Immersive Interactive Animation Culture and Tourism of the Ministry of Culture, and Chief Scientist of the China Cultural Industry Think Tank Research Center (Shaanxi Cultural Investment Group). He also serves as an Adjunct Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, a Distinguished Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at EAC France, an Expert Reviewer of the Degree Center of the Ministry of Education, an Expert Reviewer of the National Cultural and Technological Enhancement Program of the Ministry of Culture, a Director of the China Folk Literature and Art Association, Director of the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Resource Management and Evaluation Research Committee, a Founding Director of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Director of the Art Industry Research Committee, and a Founder and member of the Preparatory Group of the China Art Industry Association.

Ning Qiang (May 1962 – November 22, 2025), born in Leshan, Sichuan Province, held a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Sichuan University, a Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts Studies from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He was a professor at the School of International Journalism and Communication, Beijing Foreign Studies University, the academic leader of "International Art Communication," a doctoral supervisor, the dean of the Art Research Institute, and a distinguished art historian and art educator.

In 1983, Ning Qiang served as an intern researcher at the Dunhuang Academy. In 1987, he became the assistant director of the Dunhuang Academy. In 1997, he became a lecturer at Yale University and an assistant professor at California State University, San Diego. In 1999, he became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, later becoming an associate professor. In 2005, he became the director and professor of the Asian Art Department at Connecticut College. In 2006, as one of the first "Changjiang Scholars" distinguished professors in the field of Chinese art studies, he returned to China full-time to work, serving successively as the dean of the School of Art at Lanzhou University and a professor at the Dunhuang Studies Institute. From 2012, he served as a professor at the School of Fine Arts and the School of History at Capital Normal University. In 2021, he was transferred to Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he served as Dean of the Academy of Arts, Professor, and Doctoral Supervisor. At BFSU, he established the "International Art Communication" major. On November 22, 2025, he passed away suddenly in Dunhuang at the age of 64.

Roger Alsop's practice includes sound art, composition, interactive art & video art. He works in all forms of performance, recorded, sound, web, and video arts. He teaches undergraduate, postgraduate and research students at Melbourne University and Box Hill Institute, and has mentored performance students at Victoria University, and through the Spark program. He is an active researcher in the areas of performance and performing arts, interactive art, sound art, and composition, and has supervised and supervises research students in these areas.He has written on topics including sound and interactive arts; artistic approaches to environmental sustainability; art and bio-imaging, cross media art, and gesture interactions. Arts Victoria, VicHealth and the Royal Botanic Gardens have funded his work. Memberships include: Greenroom Contemporary and Experimental Performance panel, Box Hill Institute Higher Education Board of Studies and Music Degree Course Advisory Committee, International and Australian Computer Music Associations, Electronic Music Foundation, Human Computer Sciences Network, ANAT, and Multicultural Arts Victoria.

Nora M. Alter is a professor at Temple University’s School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts. At Temple, she served as Chair of the Department from 2009-2013 and is the founding director of Temple’s Venice Study Abroad Summer Program and is the former founding Director of FMA’s Los Angeles Study Away Program. Alter is culturally fluent in European and North American arts and culture. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Florida. Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana 1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (Michigan 2002), Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (Berghahn 2004), Chris Marker (Illinois 2006), Essays on the Essay Film (Columbia 2017), The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (Columbia 2018), and Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence (Columbia 2024). She has also published on topics in contemporary art, film, and cultural, visual, and performance studies, as well as on artists John Akomfrah, Yael Bartana, Stan Douglas, Maria Eichhorn, Renée Green, Hans Haacke, Daniel Eisenberg, Martha Rosler, and Hito Steyerl among others. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, National Endowment for the Humanities, Howard Foundation, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. From 2008-2017 she served on the Committee on Modern and Contemporary Art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Slought Foundation and on the editorial board of the journal Afterimage. In 2020 she was awarded an Art Writers Grant for her book-length project: Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, and in Spring 2021 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Current interests include research on sound and politics.

Professor Bao Lin is a Professor and doctoral supervisor at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, China. He is a renowned art critic, curator, and scholar whose research focuses on contemporary art, art theory, visual culture, and artistic creation.

Professor Bao has played an active role in the development of contemporary Chinese art through his academic research, curatorial practice, and critical writing. He has published extensively on contemporary art and visual culture and has curated numerous influential exhibitions in China and internationally. His work explores the relationship between art, society, culture, and creative expression in a rapidly changing global context.

Nora M. Alter is a professor at Temple University’s School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts. At Temple, she served as Chair of the Department from 2009-2013 and is the founding director of Temple’s Venice Study Abroad Summer Program and is the former founding Director of FMA’s Los Angeles Study Away Program. Alter is culturally fluent in European and North American arts and culture. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Florida. Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana 1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (Michigan 2002), Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (Berghahn 2004), Chris Marker (Illinois 2006), Essays on the Essay Film (Columbia 2017), The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (Columbia 2018), and Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence (Columbia 2024). She has also published on topics in contemporary art, film, and cultural, visual, and performance studies, as well as on artists John Akomfrah, Yael Bartana, Stan Douglas, Maria Eichhorn, Renée Green, Hans Haacke, Daniel Eisenberg, Martha Rosler, and Hito Steyerl among others. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, National Endowment for the Humanities, Howard Foundation, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. From 2008-2017 she served on the Committee on Modern and Contemporary Art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Slought Foundation and on the editorial board of the journal Afterimage. In 2020 she was awarded an Art Writers Grant for her book-length project: Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, and in Spring 2021 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Current interests include research on sound and politics.

Ang Bartram is Professor of Contemporary Art and Co-Lead of the Creative and Cultural Industries Academic Theme and the Creative and Cultural Industries Research Centre. Her work focuses on contemporary art, artistic research, and the creative and cultural industries.

She serves as Vice President of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), Trustee of the Live Art Development Agency, member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College, and member of the CHEAD Research Alliance Strategy Group. She is also a Collaborations Champion for the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE).

Professor Bartram holds a PhD in Fine Art Practice and Theory from Middlesex University and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She serves as an External Examiner for MA Fine Art programmes and regularly examines doctoral candidates.

Since 2024, she has represented the United Kingdom on the Management Committee of the COST Action Artistic Intelligence – Responsiveness, Accessibility, Responsibility, Equity (ARTinRARE) and is a member of its Collective Intelligences Working Group. In 2021, she was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art at Utah State University.

Amir Begić graduated in 1991 from the Faculty of Pedagogy in Osijek. In 2017, he received his doctorate from the postgraduate scientific study of Pedagogy and Culture of the Contemporary School at the Faculty of Philosophy in Osijek. From 1988 to 1989, he was employed as a guitar and solfeggio teacher at the Music School at the August Harambašić Elementary School in Donji Miholjac, and from 1989 to 1992, as a guitar and solfeggio teacher at the Braća Ribar Elementary School in Osijek. From 1998 to 2004, he taught guitar and solfeggio as an external associate at the Music School at the Dragutin Tadijanović Elementary School in Vukovar. Since 2004, he has been the head of the Akord Center for Music Education in Osijek, where he teaches guitar. From 1992 to 2014, he was a teacher of Music and choir director at the First Gymnasium in Osijek. Since 2014, he has been employed at the Academy of Arts in Osijek/Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek. In 2004, he was promoted to the title of Mentor Professor by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, and in 2009 and 2014 to the title of Advisor Professor. In 2024, he was elected to the title of Associate Professor for the Interdisciplinary Scientific Area, the scientific field of Educational Sciences. He is a mentor and co-mentor on numerous graduate and final theses. From 1996 to 2013, while working at the First Gymnasium in Osijek, he was a mentor to students of the Music Culture/Pedagogy study program at the Academy of Arts in Osijek, and from 2009 to 2014, a mentor to trainee teachers as part of taking the professional exam in Music Arts.
In the academic year 2012/13, he taught the course Pedagogical Practice as an external associate in the 4th year of the undergraduate study of Music Pedagogy at the Academy of Arts in Osijek. He is a reviewer of papers in the field of music pedagogy for journals and conference proceedings. He has published one author's book and more than 50 scientific papers in Croatia and abroad. He has participated as a speaker at numerous scientific conferences and held several lectures.

Anna Mária Bólya PhD doctoral researcher in ethnography and cultural anthropology, music theory teacher, dance history teacher. Formerly founder and leader of an art school, choir leader, singing and music teacher and subject developer. Her main area of research is sacredness and dance, as well as the relationship between movement symbolism, dance and Christian culture. Currently in her own self-organized projects, she conducts a multidisciplinary approach to the beginnings of Hungarian ballet and Hungarian stage folk dance history. She records a monographic writing on the Macedonian ritual dance tradition. She participated in the translation of the Milloss Aurél monograph. She is the leader of the Arts 5.0 Group. She teaches courses at Hungarian universities (MTE, DE) and other individual courses in music literacy, dance science, ethnographic and language. She is the theme publisher of the PTE Philosophical DI. In addition she gives guest lectures at foreign universities. She is the initiator of the following cooperative projects: dance research in an art theory approach with cultural historian Ákos Windhager, dance history curriculum development with dance historian Zsuzsa Kővágó, development of dance history, music education curriculum and science promotion material for young adult generations with Dani Erzsébet reading researcher, along with Ágnes Györffy psychology researcher and Attila Gilányi mathematician in an international collaboration. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Macedonian Scientific and Cultural Publications with Elek Bartha professor of religious anthropology. She participates in the propagation of the Macedonian culture in Hungary. Furthermore she is the founder of the Ohrid Macedonian Folk Ensemble.

Dr Karen Burns is an architectural historian and theorist, specialising in late twentieth-century global history and the British empire of the mid nineteenth-century. Her research focuses on women as architects, theorists, and users from the 1960s onwards and on nineteenth-century domesticity, design, and imperial histories. She co-ordinates the undergraduate settler-indigenous history of Melbourne course and a 1965-2000 global architectural history offered in the 300 points Master of Architecture. Her phd supervisions encompass social justice, gender and architectural theory and history. Dr Burns was an editor of Transition magazine and served on the boards of the academic journals Fabrications and Interstices. Her research work has been awarded prizes from the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand Best Conference Paper in 2009 and the 2023 Milka Bliznakov Research Prize, International Archive of Women in Architecture, the latter co-awarded with Professor Lori Brown. She is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960-2015 (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2024, 2 volumes). Other recent research work includes the co-written foreword to the Verso Feminist Classic reprint of Matrix, Man Made Space, a Matrix exhibition and on-going work into European housing and settler violence on the South-Eastern Australian frontier. Current investigations into women and architecture include the new project Organizing Women Architects and Global Solidarity 1963-1993: The International Union of Women Architects and the Cold War Divide, funded in part by the 2023 Milka Bliznakov Research Prize.

Professor Shaofeng Chen is Professor and Doctoral Supervisor in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. He serves as Vice Dean of the Institute for Cultural Industries and Chair of its Academic Committee, as well as Deputy Director of the National Research Base for Cultural Industry Innovation and Development, jointly established by the Ministry of Culture and Peking University. He is also Director of the China Internet Cultural Industry Research Institute at Zhejiang Gongshang University.
Professor Chen holds a number of academic and professional leadership positions, including Vice Chair of the Cultural Committee of the China National Democratic Construction Association (CNDCA), Vice President of the National Society for Economic Philosophy, and Expert of the China Origins Think Tank.
His research focuses on ethics, management philosophy, cultural industries, and cultural policy. He is the author of numerous influential publications, including A History of Chinese Ethics, New Perspectives on the History of Chinese Ethics, and Cultural Industry Strategy and Business Models. His work has made significant contributions to the development of cultural industry studies and cultural innovation in China.

Elizabeth Childs-Johnson is a Sinologist specializing in Chinese art and archaeology of the Neolithic through Eastern Zhou eras, and in the script of Shang period China. She studied oracle bone script with the late Professor, Chin Hsiang-heng of Taiwan National University which aided in her identification of the meaning of Shang ritual bronze imagery. Her publications cover Jade Age China; Shang belief systems, script and art; cultural heritage policy and law in modern China; and Three Gorges archaeology. She is a recipient of various fellowships, most recently an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust Paired Research Fellowship.

Dr. Albrecht Classen was born in 1956 near Bad Hersfeld in Northern Hesse, Germany. He studied at the universities of Marburg and Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986 and began his career at the University of Arizona in 1987.
He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800, but he also pays close attention to contemporary conditions, including politics, religion, economy, sports, and literature. He is also a poet of his own rights and has so far published sixteen volumes of his own texts in German, most recently: Hawaiische Impressionen (2013), Sonora: harter Klang (2015), Welterkundungen aus der Neuen Welt: Prosa und Lyrik (2021), Deep Poetic Gazes into the World (2021), and Deep Words and Epiphanies: Haikus and Word Magic (2023). 

Matteo Compareti is an art historian and professor of art history and archaeology at Capital Normal University, Beijing. His research focuses primarily on the iconography of Zoroastrian deities in pre-Islamic Persia and Central Asia. After being a Visiting Research Scholar at the prestigious ISAW (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU) in 2013/2014, he has held academic positions at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at Renmin University of China in Beijing and Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an.

Zhiyuan Cong is a world-renowned printmaker and Chinese ink painter who’s art bridges the gap between eastern and western cultures.

Alexandra Curvelo is a full professor at the Art History Department of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and, since January 2023, Director of the Art History Institute (IHA-NOVA FCSH) and its representative at the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA). In 2022, she was elected to the Scientific Council of NOVA FCSH. At the Art History Department, she coordinates the Master in Art History and Museum Studies.
With a PhD in Art History on Nanban Art and Its Circulation between Asia and America: Japan, China and New Spain (c.1550-c.1700) (2008), her research is mainly focused on the material and visual cultures of the Iberian presence in Asia, particularly Japan, during the early modern period, including processes of production, circulation, reception, consumption, and cultural transfers. From 2012 to 2015, she was the Principal Investigator of the FCT-funded project ‘Interactions between Rivals: the Christian Mission and Buddhist sects in Japan (c.1549-c.1647)’ with an international team of researchers and collaboration from the École Française d’Extrême Orient (Paris) and the Italian School of East Asian Studies (Kyoto, Japan). This project is associated with an open-access book (Peter Lang Publishing, 2021) and database (https://www.peterlang.com/document/1190560).
With extensive working experience in museums (1996-2014), she curated exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Her research also focuses on the history of museums and collections in Portugal.
Between 2018 and 2020, she was appointed Cultural Adviser for Amakusa Nanban Heritage (Japan). In 2019, she received the Special Merit Commendation Award from the Japanese Ambassador in Lisbon for the national and international dissemination of Portuguese-Japanese studies.

She holds a degree in Geography and History (Complutense University of Madrid) and a PhD in Art History (University of Castilla-La Mancha). She also holds advanced degrees in Musicology and Musical Language (Royal Conservatory of Music of Madrid), a Professional Piano Diploma, and an Advanced Diploma in Music Pedagogy (Murcia Higher Conservatory). She is a tenured secondary school teacher (on leave) and a tenured professor of Didactics of Musical Expression at the Faculty of Education in Albacete (University of Castilla-La Mancha). She is the principal investigator on several research projects in Castilla-La Mancha. She has presented papers at various national and international conferences and is the author of several articles and books on Music History, Creativity and Music Education, Music and Values ​​Education, the creation of musical teaching resources, and other topics related to educational innovation.
She has held various positions at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM): Secretary of the Department of Didactics of Musical, Visual, and Bodily Expression (from 1996 to 2006), Coordinator of the Music Area at the Faculty of Education in Albacete (since 2005), Deputy Director of the journal Ensayos at the Faculty of Education in Albacete (since 2013), Member of the Advisory Council for Artistic and Literary Culture (since 2012), and Member of the LabinTic research group at the Faculty of Education in Albacete (UCLM) and of the UCLM's Center for Musical Research and Documentation, an Associated Unit of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She is also an Associate Researcher with the Early Childhood Education and Teacher Training Research Group (HUM-205) of the Regional Government of Andalusia (since 2012). She has co-directed three doctoral theses and served on examination boards for 23 doctoral theses.

Ding Fang is a Chinese oil painter, academic, and former curator whose works blend surrealist elements with metaphysical explorations of landscapes, human solitude, and transcendent themes drawn from Tibetan highlands, Chinese plateaus, and later Christian symbolism. He trained at Nanjing University of the Arts, earning a bachelor's in arts and crafts (1978–1982) and a master's in oil painting under professors Liu Haisu and Su Tianci (1983–1986), before co-founding the Red-Travel surrealist group in 1986 and editing China Art News (1988–1990).
Ding Fang's early career featured dark, introspective cityscapes and plateau-inspired scenes emphasizing the sublime (chong gao), evolving into large-scale Metalandscape series with impasto techniques and symbolic figures, such as the angelic shadow in Angel of the Fortress (2003–2009), which reflects historical bitterness and spiritual depth. In later phases, influenced by his Christian faith, he developed the One Person’s Renaissance series, reinterpreting European masters like Rogier van der Weyden to evoke serenity, grace, and biblical motifs like "God is her rock and her fortress."Academically, he has served as professor and doctoral supervisor at Renmin University of China, dean of its School of Art (2014–2017), and president of its Renaissance Research Institute since 2014, authoring works on Eastern-Western art comparisons and leading projects on art technology and cultural preservation.
His exhibitions include the major traveling show Weathering and Cohesion (2002) at venues like the National Art Museum of China and Nanjing Museum, alongside international participations such as the 2001 Los Angeles Biennial and domestic retrospectives like Sacred Landscape (2015). Ding Fang's oeuvre stands out for prioritizing timeless beauty and spiritual inquiry amid China's post-Cultural Revolution artistic shifts, often through monumental formats that infuse natural desolation with redemptive presence.

Coordinator of the Postgraduate Program “Art Market and Collecting” at FCSH Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (first edition at 2016-2017). Coordinator of TIAMSA Subcommittee “Art Market and Collecting: Portugal, Spain and Brazil”. Assistant professor and researcher at the Institute of Art History, FCSH. Member of the research group “Museum Studies: Art, Museums and Collections”.
PhD in Museology and Cultural Heritage (2012) at the University of Coimbra. Vice-President of the Friends Association of the National Museum of Contemporary Art-Chiado Museum.
She has participated in several conferences, in Portugal and abroad, and published books and articles. Her last publication: Da coleção ao museu. O Colecionismo privado de arte moderna e contemporânea em Portugal, Caleidoscópio, Direção Geral do Património Cultural, 2016.

Dorota Folga-Januszewska is an art historian, art critic, curator,museologist,  professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is also a Deputy Director at the King Jan III Palace Museum in Wilanow, Warsaw, former curator and director of the National Museum in Warsaw.  Member AICA and ICOM (former president ICOM Poland). Her research covers topics like museology, poster and printmaking, art theory, theories of vision and neuroaesthetics. She has been published in over 300 books, journals and catalogues and curated over 60 exhibitions in Europe and US,  and served as a juror in numerous contemporary print competitions.

Henrik Frisk is an active performer (saxophones and electronics) of improvised and contemporary music and a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. He is professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm at the department for electroacoustic music composition, and his research is concerned with improvisation, interactivity, spatialisation and experimental electroacoustic music. Among other research projects he is currently involved with Musical Transformations, a project exploring musical traditions and change. He has contributed to the Routledge companion to research in the arts and is the co-editor and contributor of Acts of Creation, an anthology on artistic research supervision.
After having pursued a career in jazz in the nineties with performances at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, NYC and Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland, he is now spending most of his time composing and playing contemporary music with a recent interest in sound installation and sound art. He has worked with musicians and artists such as David Liebman, Gary Thomas, Michael Formanek, Richie Beirach, Jim Black, James Tenney, Luca Francesconi, Cort Lippe and others.\nHe has performed in Belarus, Canada, Czech Republic, China, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and Vietnam. As a composer he has received commissions from the Swedish Broadcasting Company, NOMUS, Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Dave Liebman Big Band, Copenhagen Art Ensemble, Ensemble Den 3. vej, Statens Kunstfond, Ensemble Ars Nova and several big bands, soloists and ensembles in Scandinavia. He has made numerous recordings for American, Canadian, Swedish and Danish record labels. He has had a close collaboration with Malmö based record label dB Productions but is currently mainly involved with the independent collective Kopasetic Productions.
Henrik Frisk is also a renowned teacher and apart from working at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH) he has in the past managed the Performers Department for Jazz and Improvised music at the Malmö Academy of Music for five years (1999-2004). He has also been teaching composition, saxophone and ensemble classes at the Rhythmic Conservatory in Copenhagen and has been associate professor at the University of Skövde teaching interactive music. As a visiting lecturer he has given lectures at several schools, mainly in Scandinavia.

Professor Xiaoguang Fu is Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Communication University of China and a Research Fellow at the China Online Video Research Center. He holds a Master's degree from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Journalism from the Communication University of China, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California and the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include online communication, media convergence, digital media, and communication technologies. Before entering academia, he worked in television production and media operations for Phoenix Television Europe, CCTV, and the Beijing Olympic Games.

Ana Gaio has been involved in numerous research and applied research projects in the cultural sector - she was, for example, part of the research team that produced the 2001 edition of the Creative Industries Mapping Document for the Department of Culture Media and Sport and was responsible for a number of chapters; and was also involved in the first phase of a £3m EU-Equal funded City University led project 'Celebrating Enterprise' exploring the potential for festivals and community events to play a greater role in economic development. More recently she carried out a study on the motivation of individual donors (small gifts) to give to the arts for Arts & Business.
Ana's doctoral research is concerned with the formation of public policy (cultural policy) in the European Union. Other research interests include cultural policy making; the management of creative/cultural organisations especially how business models develop in micro- and small-sized organisations; organisational performance and evaluation; and organisation capacity and related concerns.

Jisui Gong is a distinguished Professor of the School of Art Management of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has a high academic reputation and industry influence in the auction industry. 

Dejan Grba is an artist, researcher and educator. He explores the creative, technical, poetic and relational aspects of generative systems. 

Guo Yicheng is an expert in the cultural and creative industries, a PhD in Aesthetics from Peking University, a specially appointed professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and a mentor professor at the Cultural IP Studio.

Yuhong He is the founder of the Union des Artistes Asiatiques en France (UAAF) and a Chinese-French writer, art critic, curator, and senior media professional. Based in France, she has been actively engaged in promoting cultural exchange and artistic collaboration between Asia and Europe. She is a member of the French Journalists Association and the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), and is a strong advocate for international women's initiatives. Her work focuses on contemporary art, intercultural communication, cultural diplomacy, and global artistic networks.

Dr Katie Hill is a senior lecturer and curator specializing in Art from China and the Chinese diaspora. She holds an MA in Chinese from the University of Edinburgh and a DPhil in Art History from the University of Sussex. She has devised and led numerous courses on Asian art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, including founding the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art. She co-directed the recent course Navigating the Hong Kong Art Scene with Felix Kwok. Her curatorial work includes the recent exhibition Strange Wonders. Jizi and pioneers of contemporary ink from China at SOAS Gallery. She is currently an external examiner for the MA in Art History at SOAS and a trustee at the Li Yuan-Chia Foundation. Her Oxfordshire-based consultancy, the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art (OCCA), promotes the work of artists from China in the global context, in collaboration with galleries, collections and museums.

Professor Juan Huang holds a PhD in National Economics and serves as Vice Dean of the School of Applied Economics at Renmin University of China, where she is also Professor and Doctoral Supervisor. She additionally serves as Deputy Director of the Institute of Art Finance, Director of the Institute of Cultural Economics, and Adjunct Professor at the School of Arts.
Professor Huang received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the School of Finance and her doctoral degree from the School of Economics at Renmin University of China. She was also a visiting scholar at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Her research interests include finance, commercial banking theory and practice, art finance, cultural economics, and the digital economy. Her work focuses on the intersection of finance, culture, and emerging industries, contributing to both academic research and policy development in these fields.

PhD Ricard Huerta. Artist and Full Professor of Art Education in the University of Valencia (Spain). Regular member at the Institute of Creativity and Educational Innovation, and member of InSEA and ICOM. Head director of the Research Journal EARI Educación Artística Revista de Investigación. Director of the master “Art Education and Museums” (University of Valencia). Director of Museari www.museari.com Graduate in Fine Arts, in Music, and Communication. Head of the international project Women Teacher. Invited researcher in universities of France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Cuba, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Portugal, Paraguay and Chile. He has coordinated several publications and activities inside the areas of  Visual Arts, Education, ICT and Museums. Head of the project “Dechados Inclusive creativity in secondary school”. Member of the Seminar on Gender and Sexual Diversity of the Museums of Catalonia. He has published books and articles in specialized journals, having coordinated numerous publications within the field of art, education, educator training, heritage and museums. Letters and alphabets are a relevant aspect of his work both at an educational level and artistic creation. He has presented exhibitions with themes heavily impregnated by typography and calligraphy in different countries. He has directed twelve international seminars on research in art education and six international congress.

James L. Hutson has been celebrated as one of ‘America’s Most Influential and Leading Educators’ by the International Association of Who’s Who, marking another milestone in a career devoted to academic excellence and innovation.

Dr. Hutson currently serves as a professor and department head of art history and visual culture in the College of Arts and Humanities at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri. Since joining Lindenwood in 2010, he has held various impactful roles, including director of online and graduate programs, chair of art history, and assistant dean of online and graduate programs. Additionally, as an extended reality (XR) disruptor since 2022, his influence extends beyond traditional academia into emerging technologies.

Pedro Jiménez Castillo es arqueólogo, licenciado por la Universidad de Murcia y doctor por la Universidad de Granada, ganando el premio extraordinario de doctorado en 2017. En la actualidad es Técnico Superior de los OPIs en la Escuela de Estudios Árabes (CSIC). Especialista en Arqueología Islámica, ha dirigido más de 40 proyectos arqueológicos en España, en las provincias de Murcia, Alicante, Albacete y Granada; en Jordania encabezó la misión arqueológica española en el palacio omeya de Amman entre los años 1997 y 2001. Ha participado en otras misiones internacionales en Italia, Argelia y Marruecos. En la actualidad codirige el proyecto Alquerías Andalusíes, patrocinado por la Diputación de Albacete, la Junta de Castilla-La Mancha y el CSIC. Ha organizado congresos internacionales y comisariado diferentes exposiciones, entre ellas las salas permanentes de arqueología islámica de los museos de la Ciudad de Murcia, del Museo de la Muralla (Murcia), del Museo de Siyâsa (Cieza) y del Museo Etnográfico de las Alpujarras en Ugíjar (Granada). Autor de más de 140 trabajos de investigación sobre historia, arte y arqueología islámica y medieval, entre artículos de revista, monografías y capítulos de libros; destacan las publicaciones en las más prestigiosas revistas nacionales como Al-Qantara, Anuario de Estudios Medievales o Arqueología de la Arquitectura, y editoriales internacionales como Brill o British Archaeological Reports de la Universidad de Oxford.

Dr. Ángel Pazos-López holds a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), where he also earned his degree with a specialization in Medieval Art History. He completed postgraduate studies at Sapienza University of Rome and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute Sant’Anselmo.

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord / Sorbonne Paris Nord University, Sciences de l'information et de la communication, Faculty Member

Dr. Santiago Juan-Navarro is Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University, where he has taught since 1995 (Professor since 2010). A scholar of literature, film, and comparative cultural studies, his work bridges Iberian and Latin American traditions with particular attention to Cuban cinema, the politics of memory, and digital humanities.
His research spans several fronts: Cuban and Cuban-diaspora cinema; Spanish-American narrative; dystopian and utopian imaginaries; and the visual cultures of empire. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including projects on Juana of Castile, La ciudad en la literatura y el cine, and Memoria histórica, género e interdisciplinariedad. In recent years, he has developed a broad study of dystopia in twenty-first-century Cuban cinema (2008–2023), understanding it as a form of critical warning in post-utopian contexts. In parallel, he investigates Hispanidad and political theology in Franco-era cinema.
Committed to public-facing scholarship, Juan-Navarro co-founded the Cuban Diaspora Film Archive (CDfA) with filmmaker and doctoral candidate Eliecer Jiménez Almeida—a digital repository and cultural hub dedicated to documenting, preserving, and studying the audiovisual production of Cubans in exile. At FIU he designs hybrid and online courses in literature and film, including “The Films of the Cuban Diaspora,” and mentors graduate students across the humanities. He has served on editorial boards, organized conferences, and evaluated grants and fellowships for entities such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Trained as a comparative humanist, Juan-Navarro holds a Ph.D. (1995) and M.Phil. (1991) from Columbia University, and a D.Phil. (1999) from the University of Valencia. His teaching covers narrative theory, cultural memory, and transatlantic film history.
Current projects. His principal book project is Projecting Empire: The Spanish-Cuban-American War in Cinema and Cultural Memory, a transnational monograph that examines how films from the United States, Spain, and Cuba have represented the 1895–1898 conflict. Drawing on more than two decades of research and prior peer-reviewed publications, the book analyzes both fictional and non-fictional works in their historical, political, and cultural contexts to show how cinema has functioned as mythmaking, propaganda, and identity formation. It argues that screen depictions of 1898 are far from neutral: they reflect—and actively shape—national narratives of loss, heroism, and imperial ambition. Additional projects include: (1) a sustained inquiry into dystopia as a critical lens in Cuban screen cultures; (2) a political-theology reading of Hispanidad in mid-century Spanish cinema; and (3) the digital expansion of the CDfA to support research, teaching, and public curation.

Helen W. Kennedy is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on game studies, creative and cultural industries, immersive media, experiential design, and cultural evaluation.
Throughout her academic career, she has held leadership positions at the University of Gloucestershire, the University of the West of England (UWE), the University of Brighton, and the University of Nottingham. She played a key role in establishing the Play Research Group (PRG) and the Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC), both internationally recognized centers for game studies and digital culture research.
Professor Kennedy's current research explores feminist approaches to game culture, immersive and extended reality (XR) experiences, and the broader transformation of contemporary cultural practices. She has led and participated in numerous funded research projects and has published extensively on games, digital media, and experiential culture.

Dr. Sun-hyun Kim is affiliated with Yonsei University Wonju College of Medicine, South Korea. Her research interests include art psychology, clinical art therapy, art theory, and curatorial studies. Her work explores the intersection of art, psychology, and healthcare, with a particular focus on the therapeutic and educational applications of artistic practice.

As a social and educational scientist, and after graduating in Art/Visual Communication Wolfgang Knapp has been teaching and doing research since 1988 at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts in Berlin. His main focus is on interdisciplinary projects on the interface of art and science (since 1993), minorities in art and the media, artist idendity, international project cooperation, curatorial activities and pulications. („Missing Link- art meets biomedicine“, „Fettes Archiv“ „Sensing the Street“, „sterben wollen-Denkraum suizid“ „Valldigna“, „Forschen und Ausstellen“. Wolfgang Knapp is chairperson of the Comission for artistic and scientific projects at the University for the Arts in Berlin and a professor h.c. at the Department of Fine Arts and Design at Zhejiang Commercial Technical College in Hangzhou/China.

Markos Konstantakis serves as an Adjunct Lecturer and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, where he is a member of the Intelligent Interaction research group (ii.aegean.gr) and the I-Lab Intelligent Systems laboratory, active in the research fields of Intelligent Systems, Human Computer Interaction, and Digital Management of Cultural Heritage. He received a Ph.D. in the same department, entitled: “Augmented Cultural User Experience (ACUX)” and a master’s degree in “Specialization in Information Systems, Networks, and Telecommunications” from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the Hellenic Open University (HOU). Markos completed a degree and a master’s degree as a Marine Mechanical Engineer at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).
In the past, he served as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of Computer, Informatics, and Telecommunications Engineering (International Hellenic University), at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication (University of the Aegean), at the Department of Digital Media and Communication (Ionian University) and as an instructor at the e-learning program of Panteion University and University of Athens. His teaching experience includes courses offered at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels on the topics of Human Computer Interaction, Digital Culture, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Persuasive Computing and Audiovisual Media Production.
He has served as a reviewer, board member, and committee member in numerous international scientific journals, conferences, and workshops, and has been invited numerous times to give talks regarding his research interests and activity. His research on various aspects of intelligent human computer interaction and cultural informatics has been published in more than 25 journal articles and more than 20 papers in conferences and workshops and has been well recognized by the scientific community by being cited more than 380 times with a h-index of 12. He has participated in more than 10 research projects during the past 15 years at the Regional, National and European level as a Researcher and Academic Fellow.

Assistant professor, Ph.D., since 2009 works at the A. Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw. From 2009 till 2019, he was an assistant professor at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw. He is interested in the relationship between art and theatre in the Middle Ages, the function and reception of works of art in the Middle Ages, the history of European puppet theatre, and selected aspects of contemporary art.
Founder and chairman of Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachety Sztuk Pieknych (Podlaskie Association of Fine Arts, 2004-2016) – a society whose purpose was to develop and promote “Collection II” of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok (www.galeria-arsenal.pl), one of the most important public collections of contemporary art in Poland. From 2014 to 2017 he was a co-investigator in the project funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, titled: The Agency of Things New Perspectives on European Art of the Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries (http://www.agencyofthings.uw.edu.pl/index.html). Member of ENID (European Network on the Instruments of Devotion), an international research network coordinated from the University of Bergen, Norway (https://enid.w.uib.no/). Since June 2025, he has been the editor-in-chief of the bilingual (Polish–English) journal Teatr Lalek, devoted to criticism, theory, and the history of broadly conceived puppetry. (https://www.teatrlalek-pismo.pl/p/english.html). 

Izabela Kopania holds PhD in art history from the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences where she serves as Assistant Professor.  Her main fields of research are visual culture of the 18th century, cultural relations between China and European countries in the early modern period and exhibitions of ‘freak’ people in Central and Eastern Europe prior to 1939. She now works on the project devoted to the historiography of Chinese art in Europe in the period spanning the years 1600 to 1950, funded by the National Science Center, Poland. She is the author of a monograph, Objects – Gardens –Imaginings: China in the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Under the Reign of Stanislaus Augustus (2012; in Polish), editor of South-East Asia: Studies in Art, Cultural Heritage and Artistic Relations with Europe (2012) and guest editor of a special issue of Acta Ethnographica Hungarica (2019/1) entitled, Popular Landscape of Entertainment in East-Central Europe, 1850–1939.

Elisabetta has formerly been Professor of Creative Economy and Head of Professorship at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (Netherlands), Professor, Chair in Cultural Management and Head of Division at Free University of Brussels (Belgium), and Assistant Professor of Arts Management & Entrepreneurship at Meadows School of the Arts & Cox Business School, Southern Methodist University (USA). Elisabetta holds a double PhD in Economics from University Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne and Free University of Brussels (Fellow), in addition to other fellow studies and degrees in cultural economics and management, music, art history, design and fashion in major HE institutions in Europe, the USA and Australia.

LI Geng, born in Beijing in 1950, was named "Geng" by Qi Baishi . He currently serves as the President of the Li Keran Academy of Painting, a professor at the Kyoto University of the Arts in Japan, a member of the China Artists Association, and the President of the China Artists Association, Heshan Painting Society.
In September 2025, he was awarded the Forbes China Contemporary Art Master Honorary Title 2025.

Rungtai Lin has a PhD from Tufts University. Rungtai's research interests include the creative and cultural industry, human factor engineering, product design and design management.

Shuangzhou Liu is a Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE), China. He currently serves as Dean of the School of Culture and Media, Member of the Academic Committee of the School of Law, and Executive Director of the Center for Market Regulation Law Research. His research focuses on cultural law, media regulation, intellectual property, and cultural industries policy. He is also a member of the China Democratic National Construction Association (CDNCA).

Professor Ruiqi Liu graduated from the School of Law of Renmin University of China in 1982. He currently serves as Dean of the Lawyers College of Renmin University of China, Executive Vice President of the China Law Society's Research Association on Lawyer Law, and Arbitrator of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC). His expertise encompasses legal education, lawyer law, arbitration, and dispute resolution.

Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, Centro de Ciencias del Diseño y de la Construcción, Faculty Member

Ming Ma (PhD) is a Professor at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau, China; a member of the China Cultural Industries Management Committee; editorial board member of JAMLS and AC; the director of Beijing Peacock Contemporary Dance Company(NPO) and Senior adviser of Beijing Youth International Culture and Arts Association(NPO); has published 30 papers in various journals, including A&HCI; CSSCI and AMI, as well as 4 monographs, including on topics such as digital technology and performing arts, international cultural trade, arts management, etc.

Ming Ma (PhD) is a Professor at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau, China; a member of the China Cultural Industries Management Committee; editorial board member of JAMLS and AC; the director of Beijing Peacock Contemporary Dance Company(NPO) and Senior adviser of Beijing Youth International Culture and Arts Association(NPO); has published 30 papers in various journals, including A&HCI; CSSCI and AMI, as well as 4 monographs, including on topics such as digital technology and performing arts, international cultural trade, arts management, etc.

Enrique Mallen is a Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Sam Houston State University. He is also the director of the Online Picasso Project, a project he started in 1997, which is an encyclopedic digital archive of documents pertaining to the Spanish artist. He completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University.

Dr. Ángel Pazos-López holds a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), where he also earned his degree with a specialization in Medieval Art History. He completed postgraduate studies at Sapienza University of Rome and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute Sant’Anselmo.

Dr. Nadia McGowan holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. She has extensive professional experience in the audiovisual industry. Her research interests focus on the intersections of technology, media, and aesthetics, with particular attention to the impact of emerging technologies on audiovisual communication and creative practices.

Rosanna Mestre-Pérez is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universitat de València, where she has taught since 1999. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology, with a doctoral thesis on Spanish cinema, as well as degrees in Audiovisual Communication and Audiovisual Languages, all from the Universitat de València. At the same university, she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, and Multimedia Engineering. She was Visiting Instructor of Spanish at Longwood College, now Longwood University, in Virginia, and has also taught doctoral courses at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. She also taught courses of Spanish for Longwood College’s study abroad programme in Mérida, Venezuela, as well as Spanish cinema and culture, in Spanish and English, in several international programmes for USA students (UVA, ISA, UGA, IOWA...) at the Universitat de València.

Her research focuses on film studies, screen tourism, and digital communication. She coordinates CITur (Cinema, Imaginaries and Tourism), an international research group at the Universitat de València, founded in 2005 by Antonia del Rey Reguillo and recognised as a pioneering reference in Spain in the study of the relationships between cinema, social imaginaries, and tourism. In this field, she has been PI (HAR2016_77734-P) and co-PI with Jorge Nieto Ferrando (PID2020-112668GB-I00) of national research projects on film and tourism funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. One of her research subfields examines Indian cinema shot in Spain and its role in shaping cultural imaginaries, destination images, and screen tourism.

Rosanna Mestre-Pérez is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universitat de València, where she has taught since 1999. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology, with a doctoral thesis on Spanish cinema, as well as degrees in Audiovisual Communication and Audiovisual Languages, all from the Universitat de València. At the same university, she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, and Multimedia Engineering. She was Visiting Instructor of Spanish at Longwood College, now Longwood University, in Virginia, and has also taught doctoral courses at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. She also taught courses of Spanish for Longwood College’s study abroad programme in Mérida, Venezuela, as well as Spanish cinema and culture, in Spanish and English, in several international programmes for USA students (UVA, ISA, UGA, IOWA...) at the Universitat de València.

Her research focuses on film studies, screen tourism, and digital communication. She coordinates CITur (Cinema, Imaginaries and Tourism), an international research group at the Universitat de València, founded in 2005 by Antonia del Rey Reguillo and recognised as a pioneering reference in Spain in the study of the relationships between cinema, social imaginaries, and tourism. In this field, she has been PI (HAR2016_77734-P) and co-PI with Jorge Nieto Ferrando (PID2020-112668GB-I00) of national research projects on film and tourism funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. One of her research subfields examines Indian cinema shot in Spain and its role in shaping cultural imaginaries, destination images, and screen tourism.

Dr. Elisabeta Negrău is a Research Fellow (Grade III) in the Department of Visual Arts and Architecture – Medieval Period at the “G. Oprescu” Institute of Art History, Romania. She worked as a researcher within a national consortium project coordinated by the Institute between 2018 and 2020 and has been affiliated with the Institute since 2018.

Dr. M. Panagopoulos is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts at Ionian University. He received a Diploma in Electrical and Computing Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (2003). He holds a PhD in Pattern Recognition and Image Processing in Archaeology and Arts (2008). His research is broadly concerned with artificial intelligence and pattern recognition analysis in cultural, visual and artistic applications. He is a member of IEEE and of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

Eirini Papadaki is an assistant professor of Communication, Mediation and Cultural Industries at the Department of Business Administration and Tourism, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece. She holds a ptychion in Journalism and Mass Media Communication from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a PhD in Communication and Visual Culture from the University of Kent at Canterbury, Great Britain. She has organized and/or supervised several research projects, and has extensively studied the design of strategic communication in the framework of several cultural industries and their synergies, as well as their semiotic dimensions. She has taught several courses at many universities, including the University of Kent at Canterbury, Great Britain (School of Film and και Visual Studies), the University of Ioannina (Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences), the University of the Aegean (Department of Preschool Education Sciences and Educational Design), the University of the Peloponnese (Department of History, Archaeology and Cultural Resources Management), as well as the former Technological Educational Institute of Epirus (Department of Traditional Music and Department of Business Administration). She has also taught postgraduate courses at the “Cultural Policy and Development” Master Degree of the Open University of Cyprus. Since 2017 she teaches “Cultural Communication” at the “Management of Cultural Units” Master Degree of the Open University of Greece. Her publications examine subjects of visual communication, the mediation of culture and various forms of art through mass and new media, cultural industries and their synergies, as well as a variety of feedback types in different communication frameworks (from direct communication between artwork and viewer/listener in a museum/performance environment to mediated communication in the multidimensional framework of technoculture).

Dr. Ángel Pazos-López holds a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), where he also earned his degree with a specialization in Medieval Art History. He completed postgraduate studies at Sapienza University of Rome and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute Sant’Anselmo.

His academic work is specifically focused on the topic of empirical study of profound art and museum experience. He developed the first theoretical model of transformative art experiences (Pelowski & Akiba, 2011), extending from Prof. Leder’s earlier work, and has since refined this in a major new update, leading to the main theoretical model and empirical behavioral measures (Pelowski, Leder et al., 2017) which will serve as the basis for this project’s empirical WPs. He has published over 40 papers in leading journals, including important empirical studies of art experiences in museums throughout Japan, North America, and Europe. He has also published major reviews on best practice in museum study (Pelowski et al., 2017) and pioneering work detailing new behavioral and physiological methods for documenting and uncovering ecologically-valid, museum art experience. He also spearheaded the empirical studies and research collaborations employing Network modelling and latent class analysis for data- driven methods of quantifying varieties of art experience, and co-developed and has been running the Archive of Art Experiences Project which will also be extended in the present program.

He has further worked to expand his repertoire to investigations of art and the brain, first as a postdoc at the Nagoya University, Laboratory of Cognitive Informatics, one of the first laboratories to utilize fNIRS technology, which he applied to art-viewing. He has published multiple empirical and theoretical papers on fNIRS, as well as hyperscanning, and spearheaded (with his collaboration partners) the state-of-the-art analytical approaches which will be employed here. From 2015-2017 he also led a Marie Curie project to integrate causative (tDCS) and brain imaging methods with the study of art. In addition, he has developed projects and papers regarding the relation of art engagement to social factors, empathy, and/or perspective taking, mobile eye and movement tracking in museums. He was recognized with the Baumgarten Award for outstanding contributions by young scientists by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (2016). He also has experience in large projects focused on societal challenges-for example assessing social, cultural, and infrastructural factors underlying media and technology use, or factors and solutions for modulating parent decisions to register new-born children in Kenya.

Professor Mario Pisani is an architectural historian and critic. He is Professor at the Faculty of Architecture “Luigi Vanvitelli” in Aversa, Italy, and at the International Academy of Architecture in Sofia, Bulgaria, and serves as Visiting Professor at the University of Malta. He has lectured extensively at universities and academic institutions across Europe and the Middle East, contributing to the fields of architecture, architectural history, and criticism.

Nick Poulakis holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and film musicology from the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece). He teaches film music, ethnographic cinema and applied ethnomusicology at the Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory and serves as a tutor in e-learning classes on Greek music culture. He is also an adjunct instructor on Greek music, dance, theatre and cinema at the Hellenic Open University. For several years he has been working on various research projects and has written numerous articles and book chapters on the anthropology of film and TV music, media ethnomusicology and audio-visual literacy. He is the author of Musicology and Cinema: Critical Approaches to the Music of Modern Greek Films, which has been recently published in Greek by edition Orpheus.

Dr Tiija Rinta is an educationist and researcher based in London, UK. She completed her doctorate from the Institute of Education, University of London, in 2008 on children’s vocal development and the use of singing activities in speech and language therapy with children. Since then she has worked as a Research Associate for the Institute on a number of projects concerned with children’s vocal development, social inclusion and the use of music in speech and language therapy. Tiija has also worked for several international NGOs and Government Agencies in various countries (such as Taiwan, Jordan and Uganda). The products of such work are publications in international professional journals, articles in magazines, book chapters and handbooks for professionals. Tiija frequently reviews articles for the Journal of Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, and the Psychology of Music. She currently works as a Director of a Music Academy in Uganda, whilst continuing her research activities at the Institute of Education in London.

Claire Robins is Professor of Museology and Art at the Institute of Education, UCL’s faculty of Education and Society. She has a first degree in Fine Art from St Martins School of Art (now University of the Arts London), and a Master's degree and a PhD in gallery /museum education from the University of London. . Most of her career has been spent working in higher education but she has also worked as a lecturer in Further Education an artist educator in galleries and museums as a researcher and a teacher in schools. In 2009 she completed a PhD which examined the growth of artists' interventions in museums. She has published widely and given many conference papers on art and artists and their contribution to pedagogic shifts in institutional contexts.

She leads the Art, Design & Museology (ADM) Academic Group.

She is a member of the editoriay board for the journal Arts & Communication and of the editorial advisory board for   Engage, The International Journal of Visual Arts and Gallery Education.  She is also a member of ICOM (International Council for Museums), NSEAD National Society for Education in Art and Design.

Head of the UNESCO Chair on Interculturalism, Art Management and Mediation and professor of cultural policy, cultural management, cultural studies, and media studies

Milena is former President of the University of Arts, Belgrade. She is also a professor of cultural policy, cultural management, cultural studies, and media studies; and founder of the UNESCO Chair in Interculturalism, Art Management and Mediaition. Milena is an expert in participatory approaches for the design and development of local, regional and national cultural policies. Trainer and consultant in capacity building programs for strategic cultural management and entrepreneurship, Milena has developed more than 50 projects in cultural policy and management. She has experience in policy interventions in Southeast Europe (cultural policy reform in Montenegro, canton Sarajevo, city of Banjaluka, policies for culture in Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), the Caucasus, Central Asia, Arab States, India and Cambodia. She also has expertise in organizational development and capacity‐building for local cultural administrations and managers in Europe, the Arab States and India. She works as an expert in cultural policy and management for the European Cultural Foundation, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, Pro Helvetia, and the British Council, among others.  

Nancy Serwint teaches ancient art and archaeology with a focus on the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean basin. She received her doctorate in classical archaeology from Princeton University in 1987 and a master's from the same institution in 1983. Prior to that she received a master's in art history (ancient) from the University of Chicago in 1977, and her bachelor's in classics (ancient Greek) was awarded in 1973 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As a classical archaeologist, Serwint has worked on excavations in Sicily (Morgantina), in the Athenian Agora, at ancient Corinth, and since 1983 at ancient Marion/Arsinoe in Cyprus. Her research focus has been varied with investigation and publications dealing with ancient athleticism and athletic representations in the Greek sculptural repertoire and gender issues in Cyprus and the ancient Near East. Her recent work is devoted to the study of the coroplastic arts of Cyprus and ancient Israel, focusing on production and manufacturing strategies, cross-cultural stylistic influences, and the role played by terracotta votive sculpture in cult ritual and religious worship. She currently serves as the co-director of the Princeton University Cyprus Expedition.  Publication projects involve the study and publication of the Persian Period figurines from the site of Tell Halif, Israel (Lahav Research Project, Phase IV), the terracotta figurines from the area of the hippocrome in ancient Carthage (Tunisia), and the corpus of terracotta sculpture from the ancient sites of Marion and Arsinoe (Cyprus).  She is the co-president of the board of trustees of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (Nicosia, Cyprus) and is a board member of the American Schools of Overseas Research.

Dr. Ram Shergill is an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in Photography, Moving Image, Architectural Design, Luxury, Fashion Brand Management, the Bioeconomy and Creative Direction. Ram completed his PhD at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in 2024. His doctoral thesis, ‘Visions of a Critical Posthuman Practice: Embodying Exoskeletal Living Systems (ELS)' was supervised by Professor Marcos Cruz (The Bartlett School of Architecture) and Dr. Brenda Parker (Department of Biochemical Engineering). The thesis was examined by Professor Nat Chard (The Bartlett School of Architecture) and Associate Professor Jon Yoder (Kent State University, USA). The examiners commended Ram on his impressive body of original design research, highlighting that the construction of a ‘Critical Posthuman Practice (CPP)’ with textual and visual research of ‘sympoietic diffraction’ raises a host of timely questions across the disciplines of microbiology, mechanics, art, (science) fiction, architecture, fashion and photography.

Professor Maria de Fátima Matos da Silva is an Invited Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture at Universidade Portucalense, Portugal. She earned her PhD from the University of Granada, Spain, in 2008 through a doctoral program funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), culminating in the award of a European Doctorate.

Professor Jin Song received his PhD in Music Aesthetics from the Central Conservatory of Music, China. He is Professor and Doctoral Supervisor in the Department of Musicology and serves as Deputy Director of the Institute of Musicology, a Key Research Base for Humanities and Social Sciences designated by the Ministry of Education of China.

Prof. Dr. Yao Song is a Research in the School of Journalism and Literature at Sichuan University (SCU), China. His research interests include innovation design, digital creativity, digital art, and the application of emerging information technologies in the humanities. His work examines how technological advancements influence the reproduction, reinterpretation, and reorganization of art and design, with a particular focus on the role of digital creativity in innovation design. Using approaches such as machine learning, surveys, and experimental methods, he investigates the intersection of technology, creativity, and humanistic inquiry.

He is a graduate in Physics from MIT and the University of Maryland, and studied Art History at Wellesley College. He was Chief Scientist of the American arm of the $15B international Ricoh Company and Rambus Fellow at Rambus, Inc. He has held faculty positions in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, Computation & Mathematical Engineering, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges, Clark, Boston, and Stanford Universities, and the Technical University of Vienna. He is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, SPIE, IS&T, IAPR, IARIA, AAIA, IAII, and a Senior Life Member of ACM and was a 2023 Leonardo@Djerassi Fellow. He holds 64 US patents, and has published over 220 peer-reviewed scholarly articles and nine books/proceedings volumes, including "Pattern classification" (2nd ed.), "Seeing the light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision, and holography," "HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality," and "Pixels & paintings: Foundations of computer-assisted connoisseurship."

Lund University, Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Faculty Member

Eduarda Vieira, PT. Associate Professor at Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.. Director of CITAR – Centre for Science and Technologies of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She holds a degree in History – specialization in Archaeology (U. Livre – 1985), two Post graduations in Museum Studies (Portugal and Czech Republic), a Master degree in in Restoration of Architectural and Landscape Heritage (U.Évora 2003) and a PhD Conservation and Restoration of Historic and Artistic Heritage (UPV-Spain 2009). She coordinates the PhD program in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Goods – School of Arts - Portuguese Catholic University. Her main present research interests are: Sustainable Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Green Conservation; Peripheral conservation outdoors and indoors; Risk Assessment and Management , Biodeterioration) Decorative Coatings integrated in architecture; Conservation of Public Art (inorganic supports) and Documentation and Conservation of Contemporary Art. She has a wide experience of working with interdisciplinary teams and aptitude to investigate in cross-border scientific areas such those that are part of CITAR mission. She also keeps research ties with Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and Brazil. 

Shelton Waldrep teaches classes on Victorian literature, popular culture, film, and critical theory. He is the author of Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie, The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity, and the Body and The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie; the co- author of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World; and the editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture. His latest book is entitled The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film and Television.  He has published articles, interviews, and poetry in numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide and has been awarded the Trustee Professorship, the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship (twice), and the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award. He is the recipient of a Center for Collaboration and Development Grant and a Faculty Senate Research Grant, among others.

Swedish-Chinese professor and artist who travels between Europe and China, dedicated to art education, international cultural exchange, and artistic creation.

Wang Chunchen is a Chinese curator, critic, and art historian. He has been described as "one of China's most distinguished curators, art critics and historians".

Professor Yifu Wang is a distinguished expert in digital technology innovation and cultural and creative industries. Recognized as an Outstanding Expert by the Ministry of Culture of China, his research focuses on digital media technologies, cultural innovation, and the integration of emerging technologies with creative industries.

Professor Kai Wang is a curator, art educator, art critic, and painter. He holds a PhD in Literature and completed postdoctoral studies in Aesthetics and Art History at Waseda University, Japan. He has taught at Musashino Art University, Kokugakuin University, and Nihon University, and has supervised graduate students at the master's and doctoral levels. He currently serves as President of the International Academy of Art Research, Japan. His research interests include art history, aesthetics, art criticism, curatorial studies, and contemporary art.

Mark Watson earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and is an associate professor of art history at Clayton State University.

Professor Jiaxing Xie is Director of the Institute of Music Research at the China Conservatory of Music and serves as Professor and Doctoral Supervisor. He is President of the Chinese Society for Music Education and holds leadership and membership positions in several national and international academic organizations, including the International Society for Music Education (ISME). His research focuses on music education, music psychology, music aesthetics, and music pedagogy.

National Heritage Identification Committee jade group members, our country's famous jade identification, teachers from jade everyone Zhang Yongchang. In jade identification circles had "North Geng (Geng Baolu) Nang Zhang (Zhang Yongchang)" argument, and Yang Zhenhua is the first group of students worship Zhang Yongchang.

Professor Hui Yu was born in Beijing in 1959. He received his Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Nanjing Normal University in 1983 and his Master's degree in Art History from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1990.

In the same year, he joined the Palace Museum (Forbidden City), Beijing, where he has devoted his career to the exhibition, conservation, and research of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. He previously served as Deputy Director and Director of the Department of Ancient Paintings and Calligraphy. He currently serves as Director of the Department of Research Administration, as well as Director of the Research Office and Publishing Department of the Palace Museum.

Professor Yu is a Research Fellow at the Palace Museum, a Member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and a Member of the National Cultural Relics Appraisal Committee of China. His research focuses on Chinese painting, calligraphy, art history, museum studies, and cultural heritage preservation.

Professor Ding Yu is Dean of the School of Arts Management and Education at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and Director of the National Institute for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Art Education Committee of the China Artists Association and Vice Chair of the Art Industry Research Committee of the China Literary and Art Critics Association. He is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at CAFA.

Professor Yu founded China's first academic program in Visual Arts Management and has played a pioneering role in the development of arts management education and scholarship in China. He also established the China Association for Arts Management Education and serves as its President, making significant contributions to the institutionalization of arts management as an academic discipline.

His representative work, Salute to Art: Visual Arts Management in China and the United States, is the first comprehensive comparative study of arts institutions, cultural policy, cultural industries, museums, and public art in China and the United States. It is also among the first English-language publications to introduce China's experience in arts management to an international audience.

As a leading expert in arts management and cultural policy, Professor Yu has been entrusted by government agencies, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China, to organize major academic exchange initiatives and international projects promoting Chinese art and culture worldwide.

Professor Rong Zhang was born in Tianjin, China, in 1963. She graduated from Nankai University with a degree in Museum Studies from the Department of History.

Since 1985, she has worked at the Palace Museum (Forbidden City), Beijing, where she has devoted her career to the management, preservation, and research of Chinese cultural heritage. From 1985 to 1998, she was responsible for the curation and study of more than 30,000 artifacts, including ancient lacquerware, enamels, glassware, silverware, bronzes, and pewter objects.

Professor Zhang subsequently held several leadership positions at the Palace Museum, including Deputy Director of the Court History Department (1998–2002), Deputy Director of the Department of Antiquities (2002–2004), and Director of the Department of Antiquities (2004–2010). In 2010, she was appointed Director of the Palace Museum Library.

She was awarded the title of Research Fellow in 2005 and was recognized as an Outstanding Expert by the Ministry of Culture of China in 2008. Her research interests include Chinese decorative arts, museum studies, cultural heritage preservation, and the history of imperial collections.

Professor Cheng-Lin Chang is a scholar of art management, cultural industries, and art economics. He serves as Secretary-General of the China Chapter of the International Art Market Studies Association. His previous appointments include Executive Director of the Taiwan Art Bank, Researcher at the Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), and Research Director of the Dimension Endowment of Art Foundation.
Professor Chang has held visiting and adjunct academic positions at institutions including Peking University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, and the University of Bologna. He has curated major exhibitions and led numerous arts management and cultural development projects. His research focuses on art economics, art asset management, cultural industries, museum studies, and the relationship between art and commercial spaces.

1964 Born in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China
Artist, Curator
Professor and Doctoral Advisor of Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA)

Dr Xiaohuan Zhao is Professor of Sinology (Religion, Literature and Theatre), specialising in xiqu (traditional Chinese drama and theatre), with a particular focus on ritual and theatrical performances in temple theatre. He explores the relationships between ritual, religion, literature and theatre in Chinese culture, examining the influences of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism alongside folk beliefs and practices, such as nuo-exorcism and wu-shamanism. Through his research, he uncovers the literary and artistic manifestations of these beliefs and practices. His work also encompasses Chinese art, archaeology and architecture within the contexts of ritual, religion, temple and theatre, unveiling the intricate networks of cultural interactions involved.

Before joining the University of Sydney, Xiaohuan taught at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (FRAS) of Great Britain and Ireland, and a recipient of the Senior Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the Distinguished Overseas Professorship under the Shanxi One Hundred Talents Scheme, and the honorary title of Distinguished Expert on Cultural Exchange awarded by the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts (NACTA) in Beijing, among other prestigious honours and distinctions.

He has published extensively on language, culture, literature and theatre in both Chinese and English. His research is profiled in journals such as T'oung Pao, TDR/The Drama Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Religions, Ecumenica: Performance and Religion and Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Among his works are six monographs, two of which are award-winning: Classical Chinese Supernatural Fiction: A Morphological History and Chinese Theatre: An Illustrated History Through Nuoxi and Mulianxi in two volumes.

He has delivered more than 60 keynotes, public and specialist lectures, opening speeches and plenary addresses at international forums, symposia, conferences, and universities and institutes, including Oxford University, Peking University, Seoul National University, and the Kyoto-based International Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). 

Currently, he serves as the Lead Chief Investigator for 'The Transformation of Chinese Temple Theatre', an international research project funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Project programme.

Dean of Yangming Academy of Communication University of China, professor and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Arts of Communication University of China, member of the Academic Committee of Communication University of China, member of the expert group of the National Art and Science Planning Project, and vice chairman of the organizing committee of the China Yangming Mind Philosophy Summit Forum.

Professor Lin Zhou holds a PhD in Law and is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). He previously served as Deputy Director of the Intellectual Property Center at CASS.
In 1989, Professor Zhou joined the National Copyright Administration of China, where he participated in legislative research for China's Copyright Law and served as Editor of the journal Copyright. In 1994, he joined the Institute of Law at CASS, later serving as Deputy Director of the Intellectual Property Center (1996–2000) and Deputy Director of the Intellectual Property Research Division (2001–2010).
Since 1995, he has served as a People's Juror of the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court. He has also taught Art Law at the Central Academy of Fine Arts for many years and has supervised master's students specializing in art law since 2006.
His research interests include intellectual property law, copyright law, art law, cultural policy, and legal issues in the creative industries.

Dr. Unnur Guðrún Óttarsdóttir is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, artist, and art therapist. Her work focuses on the intersections of art therapy, visual arts, education, and arts-based research. She explores how creative practices can support personal development, learning, and well-being, while also contributing to innovative research methodologies. Her artistic practice encompasses a range of media and frequently investigates the relationship between creativity, nature, and human experience. Through her research and professional activities, she promotes interdisciplinary approaches that connect art, therapy, and education.

Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Academy of Arts Osijek, Music department, Faculty Member