Martin Andreller
Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, Estonia
Martin Andreller is a board member at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, Tallinn. He graduated from Tallinn University’s Institute of History in 2010. His main interest in historical research is resistance to the Soviet regime after the end of the Second World War. He has published articles in Estonian and foreign periodicals, and has been a curator and producer of several exhibitions on the topic of totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Between 2007 and 2019, he worked as a researcher and curator in different museums and institutions.
Maria Axinte
Pitesti Prison Memorial Foundation, Romania
Maria Axinte was the founder of the Pitesti Prison Memorial Foundation and of the Museum of Communism for Children. She is a museologist, a graduate of University of the Arts London and the University of Bucharest, UNESCO Chair, MBA programme. Over the past ten years, she has been coordinating events and projects related to communist repression in Romania and has developed educational programmes about political detention for the young people. Since 2018 Maria Axinte has been a member of the Scientific Council, Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. Since 2022 she has been a member of the supervisory board of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.
Dorottya Baczoni
Terror Háza Múzeum, Hungary
Dorottya Baczoni is a historian who received her BA degrees in history and French from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 2012 and in International Studies from Corvinus University of Budapest in 2013. She graduated with an MA specialising in modern Hungarian history from Eötvös Loránd University in 2014. She defended her PhD thesis in early 2024.
She started working at the House of Terror Museum, Budapest, in 2009. Between 2018 and 2019 she was head of the Department for Strategic Planning and Analysis in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary. She returned to the House of Terror Museum in 2019 and, since March 2021, has been the director of the Institute of the Twentieth Century.
Simina Badica
House of European History, Belgium
Simina Bădică is curator for the House of European History in Brussels, where she has curated the exhibitions Fake for Real: A History of Forgery and Falsification (2021) and the forthcoming Presence of the Past: A European Album (2025). Between 2006 and 2017 she was curator, researcher and head of the Ethnological Archives at the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest. She holds a PhD in history from the Central European University on curating communism in post-war and post-communist museums.
Anna Bernhardt
Kultura Paryska, France
Anna Bernhardt was studying at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, when she became involved in the activities of the Students’ Solidarity Committee, In August 1980 she helped found Solidarity and the Independent Students’ Union. She travelled to the West in 1981, and was held up in Paris owing to the impositition of martial law in Poland. She collaborated with Polish and Russian émigré circles. Since 2009 she has been with the Kultura Literary Institute Association, where, among other things, she organises the kulturaparyska.com portal. Since 2019 she has headed the Kultura Literary Institute at Maisons-Laffitte and the Polish Foundation for Parisian Culture.
John Beauchamp
Free Range Productions, Poland
John Beauchamp is a Polish-British journalist and one of the most prominent English voices in Poland. He worked for Polish Radio for over a decade, and currently produces podcasts for the Polish Press Agency (PAP). He teaches journalism, and has also worked on a number of innovative audio projects in both Polish and English, including geolocated ‘soundwalks’ for Culture.pl. He is one of the founders of Free Range Productions, an independent audio storytelling company. You can also hear his voice on the Warsaw subway.
Łukasz Kamiński
Director of the National Ossoliński Institute (Ossolineum), Wrocław
Łukasz Kamiński is a historian, specialising in the history of communism and anticommunist resistance. He is an assistant professor at University of Wrocław. From 2000 to 2016, he worked for the Institute of National Remembrance, and was its president from 2011 to 2016. From 2017 to 2021 he was the president of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, and since 2022 he has been the director of the National Ossoliński Institute in Wrocław. He is the co-editor (with Grzegorz Waligóra) of the history of Solidarity (in 6 volumes, Warsaw 2010).
Martin Klimza
Museum of Victims of Communism, Slovakia
Martin Klimza graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 2021 with a degree in modern history. In his dissertation he researched how the experience of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact in 1968 affected the decision making of people in regards to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. After graduating he returned to Slovakia and started working in the Museum of Victims of Communism, where he is in charge of education and workshops focused on secondary school students. Klimza is currently undertaking a PhD at the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University.
Laura Kolbe
University of Helsinki, Finland
Laura Kolbe is professor of European history at the University of Helsinki. She is author of Helsinki, the Daughter of the Baltic Sea, editor of Finnish Cultural History I-V and co-editor of the series History of Metropolitan Development in Helsinki – post 1945. Kolbe’s latest research deals with urban governance, city halls and municipal policy-making in Helsinki and Scandinavian capital cities during the 21st century. Kolbe is founder and chair of the Finnish Society for Urban Studies (2000). She was president of the International Planning History Society from 2007 to 2012. She is currently the chair for history committee of the City of Helsinki.
Robert Kostro
Polish History Museum, Poland
Robert Kostro is a historian and director of the Polish History Museum in Warsaw. He served as director of the Foreign Affairs Office at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. He co-created the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and was its programme director. Mr Kostro is a member of many advisory and scientific committees in museums and culture institutions including the National Museum in Kraków, the National Ossoliński Institute, as well as the chairman of the advisory board of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. Kostro is the author of numerous articles published in collective works and periodicals.
Hanna Liubakova
journalist, Belarus
Hanna Liubakova is a journalist and analyst from Belarus. She is a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and has written about the latest developments in Belarus for the Washington Post, The Economist, Deutsche Welle and other international media organisations. She won the 2023 One Young World Journalist of the Year Award and was the 2021 European Press Prize finalist. Hanna began her career at the only independent Belarusian channel, Belsat TV, banned by the regime in Minsk, as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
Andrzej Mietkowski
Andrzej Mietkowski lived in the West in the 1980s, mainly in Paris. He was a correspondent and journalist for Radio Free Europe. He has worked for the BBC and Deutsche Welle, published in the French press and is interested in the writings of Polish and Russian émigrés. After the fall of communism and the launch of the RWE office in Warsaw, he was its head and then programme director of RWE Inc.
Emma Nardi
International Council of Museums
Emma Nardi is the president of International Council of Museums (ICOM). Nardi graduated in humanities specialising in art and French Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Emma is a former full professor of Museum Education at the Faculty of Education Sciences of Roma Tre University, where she founded the first University Museum Education Centre in Italy. Throughout her career, she has continued to develop projects concerning museum education. At ICOMS’s Prague 2022 General Conference, Emma successfully ran for president and has been acting as the official representative of ICOM ever since.
Vjeran Pavlaković
UNIVERSITY RIJEKA, DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES, ZAGREB
Vjeran Pavlaković is a professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his PhD in history in 2005 from the University of Washington, DC, and has published articles on cultural memory, transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. He is a co-editor of the volume Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia (Routledge, 2019), which was published in Croatian in 2022. He was the lead researcher on the ‘Memoryscapes’ project as part of Rijeka’s European Capital of Culture in 2020 and a co-founder of the Cres Summer School on Transitional Justice and Memory Politics, as well as a researcher for Rijeka/Fiume in Flux.
Paolo Pezzino
National Museum of Resistance in Milan, Italy
Paolo Pezzino is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Pisa. His current research fields are the Sicilian mafia, the massacres of civilians during the Second World War, the history of the Resistance and the history of Republican Italy. He has been a member of the Italian-German Historical Committee, appointed in March 2009 by the two Foreign Offices for joint collaboration on the relations between the two countries in the Second World War. He also coordinates the scientific committee that is planning the new National Museum of Resistance in Milan (opening in 2026).
Ihor Poshyvailo
Maidan Museum, Ukraine
Ihor Poshyvailo is a general director of the National Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes and Revolution of Dignity Museum (Maidan Museum) in Kyiv. He is a cultural activist, ethnologist, museologist, cultural manager and art curator, and holds a PhD in history. Poshyvailo is a vice-chair of the ICOM-DRMC, and a corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute of America. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. When the large-scale Russian–Ukrainian war started, he co-founded the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI).
Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt
Malmo University, Sweden
Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, a member of Academia Europaea, is a professor in media and communication at Malmö University. Her research takes a critical, creative and action-oriented approach. She examines how digital technologies and their impact on our everyday lives are cocreated through cultural, professional and interpersonal contexts. Much of Pille’s recent research efforts are dedicated to understanding the datafication of people in museums and media. She has been experimenting with creative research methods and creative research output, including infographics and exhibitions.
Michał Przeperski
Polish History Museum, Poland
Michał Przeperski has a PHD in history and is employed by the Polish History Museum, Warsaw, for which he has been its spokesperson since June 2022, and of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialises in the history of Central Europe in the 20th century.
Wojciech Soczewica
Auschwitz Memorial, Poland
Wojciech Soczewica is a graduate of the Institute of International Relations at the University of Warsaw and the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He lectures at SWPS University in Warsaw. He has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later in the Office of the Prime Minister's Plenipotentiary for International Dialogue. Between 2013 and 2015, he was director for International Cooperation in the Office of the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights. Following that, he became director for international cooperation at Warsaw City Hall. He became a board member and director general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation in 2019.
Bistra Stoimenova
The European Association of History Educators (EuroClio)
Bistra Stoimenova is chair of Bulgarian History Teachers’ Association and president of the board of EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators. Her professional interests are in modern history, multiperspectivity and multicultural education, civic education, the use of ICT and the digital environment in history teaching as well as active strategies for learning. She had many publications in the field of education, methodology of teaching history, civic education and foreign language learning. She is also chief editor of the Bulgarian History Teachers’ Association journal, Dialogue in History.
Elias Stouraitis
Ionian University, Greece
Elias Stouraitis is a postdoctoral researcher in artificial intelligence and history at the University of Thrace. He studied at the University of Athens and received a master’s degree in modern Greek history. He completed his thesis on historical culture and digital games at the department of history in the Ionian University. He has taught history and philology courses. His research interests include historical culture, consciousness and thinking, and also social media, public history and digital games, and the design of educational software for teaching and learning history in both formal and informal settings.
David Sypniewski
SWPS University, Poland
David Sypniewski is the originator and head of the Artificial Intelligence Open Lab at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw. He teaches social robotics, creative coding and artificial intelligence in the Arts and Creative Activities, among others. Previously, he worked at the creative design studio Rzeczyobrazkowe. Before that, he co-managed the Practitioners of Culture Association, where he worked with film, photography and theatre with groups at risk of social exclusion. He grew out of the third sector and still defines himself as a social activist today.
Florian Traussnig
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Austria
Florian Traussnig is a historian in the field of contemporary military history, exile and propaganda studies. He has published three monographs on the resistance from the outside against Hitler’s Germany by Austrian exiles. At the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War in Graz, he is the principal investigator for the ongoing project: ‘My job will be rock climbing …’ – short digital biographies and a database of Austrian exiles in the US 10th Mountain Division of the Second World War. He is also consultant for education and culture at Bildungsforum Mariatrost in Graz.
Barbara Walshe
Barbara Walshe is an experienced restorative justice facilitator and an accredited mediator. A former chair of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. In October 2022, she accepted the Polish Prize of Sérgio Vieira de Mello by the Villa Decius Association in Kraków, Poland, on behalf of Glencree. From her role as a peace observer and envoy in the Israel/Palestine conflict to her ongoing work in the Northern Ireland conflict, her work with prisoners and those harmed by the trauma of sexual abuse within the Catholic church, she continues to be a strong voice for restorative justice locally, nationally and internationally.
Audrey Whitty
National Library of Ireland
Audrey Whitty is a curator, art historian and archaeologist and the director (CEO) of the National Library of Ireland. She was previously the deputy director of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) as well as head of Collections and Learning at the NMI. She has worked as a curator specialising in ceramics, glass and Asian collections at both the NMI and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. She has a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in history of art. She has authored over 90 publications and is a past chair (2020–23) of the Irish Museums Association.
Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska
Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska has been director of the Museum of Warsaw since 2021, with a PhD in art history. From 2014 to 2020 she was a curator at the Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris. From 1999 to 2010, she was a curator at the Zachęta National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw. She was co-founder of the Archaeology of Photography Foundation and its president from 2008 to 2014. She is the author of over 40 exhibitions and catalogues, including Brassaï – Graffiti (2016), David Goldblatt (2018), Dora Maar (2019) and Moi Ver (2023).
Photo credit: Tomasz Kaczor
