Patty Gerstenblith is a distinguished research professor of law at DePaul University and director of its Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law. She is founding president of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (2005-2011), an officer of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield and senior advisor to the ABA’s Art and Cultural Heritage Law Committee, and a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. From 2011 to 2017, she served as an appointee of President Obama as the chair of the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the U.S. Department of State, on which she had previously served as a public representative in the Clinton administration. From 1995 to 2002, she was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property. Her publications include the casebook, ART, CULTURAL HERITAGE AND THE LAW (now in its fourth edition), and her articles, The Disposition of Movable Cultural Heritage, in INTERSECTIONS IN INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE LAW (Anne-Marie Carstens and Elizabeth Varner eds. Oxford Univ. Press 2020); Theft and Illicit Excavation: Legal Principles and Responses, in OXFORD HANDBOOK ON INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE LAW (Francesco Francioni and Ana Vrdoljak eds. Oxford Univ. Press 2020), and Provenances Real, Fake and Questionable, 26 INT’L JOURNAL OF CULTURAL PROPERTY 285-304 (2019). Gerstenblith received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, her Ph.D in art history and anthropology from Harvard University, and her JD from Northwestern University.

Vanessa Rousseau teaches in the Art History Department of the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, MN  where she specializes in the art and archaeology of the Ancient-Medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in cross-cultural and inter-media exchange in the Late Antique era. She also works on interdisciplinary object authentication, exhibitions, and looting and the antiquities trade. She is the Specialist for Wall Paintings and Skoutlosis with the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, and Antiquities Consultant for the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Rousseau received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota, her M.A. in Art History from the University of St. Thomas, and her Ph.D in Art History from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Corine Wegener is Director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), an outreach program dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage in crisis situations in the U.S. and abroad. SCRI’s work includes projects in Syria, Iraq, Haiti, Nepal, and around the world. SCRI also co-chairs, with FEMA’s Office of Environmental and Historic Preservation, the Heritage Emergency National Task Force, part of the U.S. National Disaster Recovery Framework. Before coming to the Smithsonian in 2012, Wegener was an associate curator in the department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. During a concurrent career as a US Army Reserve officer, she served on several military deployments, including as an Arts, Monuments, and Archives Officer assigned to assist after the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum. Wegener has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Nebraska Omaha and MA degrees in Political Science and Art History from the University of Kansas.

PROGRAM MODERATOR

Mark Meister is the Executive Director and President of The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.  From 2000 to 2017, he was President of the Dayton Society of Natural History, where he administered two National Historic Landmark archaeological sites – SunWatch Indian Village/Archaeological Park, and the Fort Ancient Earthworks and Nature Preserve, which has just been designated as a World Heritage Site.  Prior to that, from 1989 to 1999, he was the Executive Director of the Archaeological Institute of America, the largest archaeological organization in the U.S., which advocates for the preservation of the world’s archaeological heritage and works to preserve archaeological sites around the world.