Jump to:   Directors | Staff | Representatives | Trustees | Advisors | Art Crime Board | Selected Volunteers

Directors

Lynda Albertson   director@artcrime.info
Chief Executive Officer
A business consultant and executive mentor, Lynda Albertson has had a 25-year career in cultural heritage, academic, public and corporate administration in North America and Italy. She has a particular interest in museums, cultural heritage conservation, art in public spaces and the development of preservation collaborations and partnerships with individuals and agencies internationally. Outside the world of galleries and museums, she has worked diligently to heighten cross cultural awareness within an increasingly global society.

Derek Fincham  fincham@artcrime.info
Academic Director
Derek Fincham is an Assistant Professor at South Texas College of Law.  His research focuses on the intersection of law with art and antiquities.  He holds a Ph.D. in cultural heritage law from the University of Aberdeen, and a J.D. from Wake Forest University.  He maintains a weblog at http://illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com/. 

Staff

Urska Charney
Head of Design, The Journal of Art Crime
Urska Charney is the Head of Design of the Journal of Art Crime and the Director of Design for ARCA. Mrs Charney is a Slovene sinologist, artist, and ancient linguist. Having lived and worked in China for several years, she developed an interest in art crime in China. Mrs Charney is in charge of graphic design and photography for ARCA's projects, including The Journal of Art Crime, prospecti, and media material.

Catherine Schofield Sezgin  catherine@artcrime.info
ARCA Blog Editor
Catherine Schofield Sezgin has edited ARCA's blog since October, 2010.  Ms. Sezgin graduated from ARCA's Masters Program in International Art Crime in 2009, with a dissertation about Canada's largest art theft, the 1972 unsolved robbery of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (and presented her paper to ARCA's International Art Crime Conference in Amelia in 2010).  She published an essay titled "Turkish Archaeological Sites and the Trade of Illegal Antiquities" in the Journal of Art Crime in the fall of 2009.  In addition to writing about art thefts and Nazi-looted art, Ms. Sezgin is working on an art crime mystery set in Amelia.  Previously, Ms. Sezgin worked in commercial real estate finance for 15 years and graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor of Science in Finance.  She worked on her high school newspaper for three years, rising to co-editor-in-chief.  In college, she worked for two years on the daily newspaper, first as a reporter, then as a news editor and was the college chapter's president of Sigma Delta Chi, the Society for Professional Journalists.

Monica Di Stefano
Monica Di Stefano was born in Amelia. She is a graduate in Foreign Languages and Literatures at University of Perugia, city where she has spent four years studying and working at the Book Library and Tourist Information Point of the Rocca Paolina. She is living in Amelia and works as a teacher of English and Spanish languages in High Schools and also teaches Italian to foreigners. She is the President of the Association ‘I Poligonali’, the group that manages the important archaeological site of Roman Cisterns and works to improve the historical, cultural and touristic richness of Amelia. She has travelled a lot and she likes working with people of different cultures. For many personal experiences, she has developed a marked ability in dealing with public relations and in the organization of events.   

Cathal Blake  cal@artcrime.info
Private & Corporate Gift Coordinator
Cathal Blake is a firefighter-paramedic in California. He has worked as a Finance Chair for the Young Democrats of San Diego, and lobbied the California State Legislature for Human Rights Watch. Before serving as a first responder, he was a finance aide to New Hampshire Governor John H. Lynch. Mr. Blake has a History degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he received several research grants and taughtethics in public health.

Madi Gandolfo
Operations and Italian Relations Director
Madi Gandolfo is a native of Rome. After graduating from the University of Genoa, she pursued her doctoral studies at Yale University, where she would later work both in the Provost Office and as Associate Master of a residential college. Prior to her return to Yale, Madi served for 10 years as Press Attache’ at the Embassy of Italy in Ottawa, where she also organized official visits and G8 Summits. After twenty years working and raising her family in Ottawa and in New Haven, Madi returned to Rome and applied her extensive experience to establishing the Yale Language Study Abroad Program in Amelia, a city she has chosen as her second home. In addition to her work for ARCA and Yale, Madi is involved in restoration projects of old houses in Umbria and the promotion of Italian gastronomy; she divides her time between Rome and Umbria, where she produces high quality small-batch olive oil from the grove surrounding her restored farmhouse.

Representatives

Rubens Salles Pereira Orrin  rubens@artcrime.info
South America Representative
Rubens Orrin is a police officer São Paulo - Brazil´s "Polícia Civil", with a law bachelor´s degree in University "Anhembi-Morumbi", he has a special interest in history of art and the methodology of art forgeries and thefts. He believes that the study of author´s history and psichologial patterns may have an influence on forgeries investigations.

Ann Qushair ann@artcrime.info
West Coast Representative
Ann Qushair is a 1994 graduate of Cornell Law School. She currently practices law in Los Angeles, specializing in labor and employment law and appellate law. For the past twenty years, Ann has actively pursued her passion for art through, among other things, independent study and attending art exhibits locally and during her travels throughout the U.S. and Europe. Ann's specific background and interest in art crime developed over the past several years while creating a proposal for a top U.S. art show, which addressed the vulnerability of art to acts of God and man. Ann continues to pursue her independent study in art crime and related legal issues.

Ann Shaftel ashaftel@artcrime.info
Canada Representative
Ann Shaftel works as Consultant and Conservator for museum and monastic collections, and has lectured and published on thangkas for the past 37 years. Ann is a Fellow of AIC, Fellow of IIC, and is a member of CAPC. Ann holds an MS in Art Conservation, an MA in Asian Art History, and worked and studied at the ICCROM Centre in Rome. Ann apprenticed with Tibetan master painters for 15 years and interviews Buddhist teachers about Thangkas. Her clients include Buddhist monasteries and high profile museums around the world, including Royal Government of Bhutan, Sikkim’s Namgyal Institute, LTWA Museum in Dharamsala, Art Institute of  Chicago, Rubin Museum in NYC, Shambhala International, and has ongoing teaching sessions at universities and museums in North America and Australia.

Virginia Curry  virginia@artcrime.info
US Representative, Advisor on Policing
Virginia Curry  is a retired FBI Special Agent and charter member of the FBI Art Crimes Task Force. During her service with the FBI Ms. Curry sucessfully completed many major art crimes investigations and undercover assignments and  was honored for her achievements by the FBI and the City of Los Angeles.   Ms Curry is currently completing a Master Degree Program in Art History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Ms Curry holds a graduate gemologist (GG) degree from the Gemological Institute of America and has completed an undergraduate teaching degree in Spanish and Italian education.  She has also completed  Masters Degrees  in Italian as well as Spanish Literature. Ms Curry has represented the FBI at several national and international symposiums concerning cultural patrimony issues and will continue her interest in cultural patrimony pursuits after the completion of her studies at Southern Methodist University.

Stephanie Goldfarb  stephanie@artcrime.info
Researcher and Student Representative
Stephanie Goldfarb is a sophomore intending to double major in Classics and Art History at Yale University.

Travis McDade  travis@artcrime.info
Professor of Library Studies, University of Illinois Law School
Travis McDade is Curator of Law Rare Books at the University of Illinois College of Law. An expert in the area of book, map and document theft, he is the author of The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman and is currently finishing a second nonfiction title on book crime. At Illinois, he teaches a class called Rare Books, Crime & Punishment and, before coming to Art & Crime, wrote about the subject for two years on a popular blog called Upward Departure. This summer, McDade will teach Forgery and Deception in the Art World as part of the MA program sponsored by ARCA.

Trustees

Noah Charney
Founding Director, ARCA
Noah Charney holds advanced degrees in Art History from the Courtauld Institute in London and the University of Cambridge in Great Britain. He has worked closely with law enforcement agencies, museums, and security experts around the world, to study the phenomenon of art crime. In addition to teaching and running ARCA, he is an internationally best-selling novelist and writer of non-fiction on the subjects of both art history and art crime. Recently a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University, he is currently Adjunct Professor of Art History at The American University of Rome.

Joni Fincham  support@artcrime.info
Treasurer
Joni Fincham has six years of experience working in cultural nonprofit organizations and social enterprises in both the United States and the United Kingdom and has served as Managaing Director for ARCA since 2010 where she focused on strategic and business development, grant-writing and marketing. She holds an MBA from Loyola University in New Orleans and degrees in Strategic Communications and French from the University of Kansas.

Col. Giovanni Pastore
Director of the Carabinieri Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage

Dennis Ahern
Head of Safety and Security, Tate Galleries

Richard Ellis
Private Art & Security Consultant and former Director of Scotland Yard’s Arts & Antiques Unit

Anthony Amore
Director of Security, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Matjaž Jager
Director, Institute of Criminology, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Erik Nemeth
www.culturalsecurity.org, Santa Monica, California
Erik Nemeth, an independent scholar in Santa Monica, California, explores the interrelation of cultural property and international security—cultural security (www.culturalsecurity.org). In publishing on the intersection of art history, illicit markets, and intelligence studies, he examines the evolving relevance of cultural property in foreign affairs. Following a decade in the software-development industry in the United States and the former East bloc, Erik pursued graduate studies in neuroscience. Dissertation research in retinal physiology led to studies in neuroaesthetics, which led to research in leveraging scholarship across disciplines. While serving as an analyst in Research Databases at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, Erik researched web-based methods for cross-disciplinary sharing of scholarly publications. In presenting on the potential for cross-disciplinary ontology to enable communication between scholars in the humanities and the sciences, he has explored the concept of “cultural intelligence” as a means to developing the strategic value of cultural property in foreign policy. Erik has published in journals such as Terrorism and Political Violence and International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence and presents at conferences in art history, information science, and criminology. He also serves on the editorial board of Journal of Art Crime and as a trustee for the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA). Erik holds a BA in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Vision Science, both from the University of California at Berkeley.

A. J. G. Tijhuis
University of Leiden and Pontius Law Firm, The Netherlands

Derek Fincham
Assistant Professor, South Texas College of Law

Selected Advisors, Former Trustees, & MA Program Lecturers

Dick Drent
Director of Security, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

David Simon
Professor of Art History, Colby College

James William Hess, Esq.
US Attorney

Petrus van Duyne
Professor of Criminology, University of Tilburg

Tom Flynn
Art Historian and Art Critic

Patricia Garland
Senior Conservator, Yale Art Gallery

Vernon Rapley
Director of Scotland Yard’s Arts & Antiques Unit

Danielle Carrabino
Art Historian, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Silvia Ciotti Galetti
Professor of Criminology and Director, Eurocrime Think Tank

Toby Bull
Hong Kong Police
Toby J.A. Bull lives and works in Hong Kong, China. He is a qualified art authenticator and holds a degree in Fine Arts Valuation. Since 1993, Mr. Bull has worked for the Hong Kong Police Force. Currently, as a Senior Inspector of Police and posted to the Marine Division, he has extensive experience in mounting anti-smuggling and anti-illegal immigration operations along the Sino-Hong Kong southern water boundary. He is an Associate Member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and is also a registered volunteer with the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (CHP) – an officially recognized Chinese NGO whose core competency lies in cultural heritage laws and policy. Mr. Bull recently wrote a paper on the problems of fake Chinese antiquities in the marketplace, as well as the illicit antiquity trade flowing out of China and into Hong Kong.

Terressa Davis
Executive Consultant

Editorial Board for the Journal of Art Crime

Lord Colin Renfrew
Professor of Archaeology, University of Cambridge 

Petrus van Duyne
Professor of Criminology, University of Tilburg, Netherlands

Matjaz Jager
Director, Institute of Criminology, Slovenia

Travis McDade
Professor of Library Studies, University of Illinois Law School, US

Ken Polk
Professor of Criminology, University of Melbourne, Australia

David Simon
Professor of Art History, Colby College, US

Erik Nemeth
Independent Scholar, Santa Monica, California

Liisa van Vliet
Accenture Consuling, UK

Dick Drent
Director of Security, the Van Gogh Museum, Netherlands

Anthony Amore
Director of Security, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, US

Dennis Ahern
Director of Security, the Tate Museums, UK

Richard Ellis
Former Director of Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiquities Unit, UK

Col. Giovanni Pastore
Vice-Commandante of the Carabinieri Art Protection Unit, Italy

Neil Brodie
Archaeologist and Researcher, Stamford University, US

David Gill
Professor of Archaeology, University of Swansea, Wales

Edgar Tijhuis, Esq.
VU University in Amsterdam, and the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement

Benoit van Asbroeck, Esq.
Attorney, Brussels, Belgium

Howard Spiegler, Esq.
Attorney, US

Selected Volunteer Agents & Researchers

Belen Carrasco
Belén Carrasco has a law degree from the University of Navarra. She was trained as solicitor in the law firm Fernando Scornik Gerstein in London in criminal, civil and commercial law. Since 1997, she has worked as solicitor in Spain with the Spanish law firm Herrera y Abalos in Málaga. Ms. Carrasco's main areas of practice are construction, property investment, litigation, and art inheritance protection.

Emily Blyze
Emily Blyze works in the Development Department at The Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her focus is fundraising campaigns and high profile donor events.

Jure Škrbec
Jure Skrbec is an assistant and researcher in organized crime and corruption at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. Under his mentor Bojan Dobovšek, PhD, he has worked on a range of projects, including: corruption and informal networks; informal networks in Europe; art crime; and corruption in politics. He has presented papers at numerous conferences. Mr. Skrbec has also worked at the Institute for Criminology and the prison administration of the Republic of Slovenia. In 2006, he began work as an external consultant at Commission for the prevention of corruption. Mr. Skrbec represents Slovenia in GRECO – Group of States against Corruption, Council of Europe, Strasbourg. He also represents Slovenia in the OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Saša Vucko
Sasa Vucko is an assistant and researcher in organized crime and corruption at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. Since 2004, he has studied criminal investigation under Darko Maver, PhD. He has authored numerous papers and organized conferences on criminology. His projects have included: analysis of the effectiveness of police investigation of crimes from the aspect of development of crime investigation and standards of evidence in criminal procedure; ensuring presence of parties and other participants in court proceedings; corruption in public procurements; and art crime.

Claudia Nardini
Claudia Nardini has Masters in Modern Art History from the University of Pisa, where she published an article entitled "Bernardino Poccetti e gli affreschi di villa Bottini a Lucca." She did postgraduate studies in Communication and Organization about Cultural Events.”

Valeria Gordillo James

Heather Free

Kelley Robison

Antonio Arch
Canadian/Caribbean Liaison
Antonio Arch is an Art Consultant and collector based in Toronto and Grand Cayman. He is currently working on a book that ties corporate and public art with productivity, creativity and innovation, due to be released in 2010.