Dr Sophia Bakogianni is a museum curator and works at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens. She is also an active researcher in the field of digital culture. Her expertise includes art history and management of cultural organizations, implementation of digital technologies in museum exhibitions, and project management in EU-funded research projects of digital applications in the cultural sector. She has a teaching experience in the field of museum studies and digital culture. Sophia has graduated from the School of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and has a Master of Arts (M.A.) in History of Art from the same School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Cultural Organizations Management from the Hellenic Open University, and a Master’s in education (M.Ed.) from the Hellenic Open University, too. She has been awarded her doctoral degree in Social Information Systems from the Open University of Cyprus, entitled “Understanding Museum Social Media Experience”. Her dissertation concerns users’ interactions with museums on social media. Her research interests lay at the intersection between cultural heritage and digital technologies, focusing on user-centered perspectives and socio-cultural analytical frameworks. Currently, she is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

Emma June Huebner is a multidisciplinary artist, a high school media arts teacher, and a Ph.D. student in Art Education at Concordia University. She has worked in several museums, including the McCord Museum (Montreal), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), the Canadian Guild of Crafts (Montreal), and the Unterlinden Museum (Colmar, France). Emma completed a B.A. in Art History and Communication (McGill University), a B.Ed. in Education (University of Ottawa) and an M.A. in Art Education (Concordia University)—pursuing her interests in museums and art education. Her high school teaching practice, as well as her museum experiences, have shaped her research interests. Emma is as fascinated by museum education and new technologies as she is by filmmaking and emerging digital art practices in schools. These digital practices allow the combination of her passions for music, dance, performance, and the visual arts. Among her recent projects, she has explored social media use as an artistic and digital storytelling tool. Her SSHRC-funded Ph.D. research focuses on the use of social media as teaching and learning tools in museums. She has presented research papers at a dozen national and international conferences this past year. As a singer-songwriter, Emma has also performed her music in over 60 shows and festivals in the past decade and has featured her performance-dance films in juried exhibitions and film festivals. With Julie Talbot, she is a co-founder of the Canadian Youth Film Festival. This festival showcases and celebrates films by elementary and high school students.

Dr Cassandra Kist is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Computer and Information Sciences (Glasgow). Her research combines several disciplines including Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, to investigate the overlaps and disconnections between cultural heritage practices, social inclusion/exclusion, and digital infrastructures. She is particularly interested in the role of cultural heritage practices on digital communication platforms for challenging prejudice. During her PhD research, she was a Marie Curie Fellow in the Horizon 2020 European Union Training Network POEM (Participatory Memory Practices). Her PhD research investigated the relation between museums’ use of social media and everyday outreach work, grounded in museum institutional contexts. She completed her master’s degree in Museum Studies (University of Toronto) and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology (University of Alberta).

Dr Blaire Moskowitz is a museum consultant with expertise in research, evaluation, strategy, and content development with experience across the United States and United Kingdom. Recent projects include evaluating a legacy artist residency program, analyzing the output of government arts funding, and writing an audio tour script used in promotions for a major film. Past experiences include digital project manager, interpretive specialist, marketing manager, and editor of a peer-reviewed research journal, all at internationally recognized museums and museum affiliates. She is also the creator and moderator of Reddit’s MuseumPros, the world’s largest independent online community of museum professionals. Blaire recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, where she researched how online expert communities align with museums’ curatorial subject matter. The research examines how museums recognize, acknowledge, and participate in these online communities, and how both museums and community members navigate and negotiate exchanges of control and knowledge while recognizing that their interactions have very different motivations. Prior, Blaire earned her M.A. in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and B.F.A. with a double major in illustration and art history from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Dr. Arran Rees is a researcher interested in museums, digital culture, and action-focused methodologies and facilitates the Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage at the University of Leeds. He is currently working on the Congruence Engine project, a three-year AHRC-funded project led by the Science Museum Group, where he is co-facilitating the project’s action research methodology. Alongside this, Arran is also interested in exploring how contemporary collecting and both queering and decolonial work in museums affects long-established collections management processes. Arran’s doctoral research focused on how collecting from social media platforms challenges museological practices and experimented through collecting an internet meme at the National Science and Media Museum, in Bradford. Before undertaking his PhD, Arran worked as both a curator and a collections manager at a number of museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Cardiff and the Royal Mint Museum.

Dr Angeliki Tzouganatou is currently a Research Project Manager & Open Infrastructure Specialist in OpenAIRE AMKE, a non-profit organization championing open scholarship. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at the University of Hamburg, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie POEM PhD Fellow. Her PhD thesis is titled “Openness and fairness in the digital ecosystem: on the participation gap in cultural knowledge production”. Her doctoral work focuses on the participation gap in cultural knowledge production towards fair practices and produces new open models. Angeliki has completed the MSc in Digital Heritage at the University of York. She has graduated from the Department of History and Archeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and completed part of her undergraduate studies at the University of Bologna in Italy. She has teaching and working experience at various research projects and cultural heritage institutions in the domains of digital heritage, digital curation and arts management.