Vision: Museums and Leadership
Elizabeth Merritt
Elizabeth Merritt is the American Alliance of Museums’ Vice President for Strategic Foresight and Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums – a think-tank and research & development lab for the museum field. She studied ecology and evolution as an undergraduate at Yale and received her masters in cell and molecular biology from Duke University. Her museum career has included working in a children’s museum, as well as natural history and history museums, and she is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute’s Museum Management Program.
Marek Prokůpek
Marek Prokůpek is Assistant Professor in Arts Management at KEDGE Arts School, KEDGE Business School in France. Marek obtained his PhD at the Department of Arts Management at the Prague University of Economics and Business. Previously, Marek was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the LabEx ICCA (Industries culturelles et création artistique) in Paris. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of innovative business models of museum, museum fundraising and philanthropy and its ethical dilemmas, and alternative finance models in arts and culture. Marek has published several articles and book chapters on the topic of museum finance, the role of ethics in museum fundraising and museum innovative business models. Marek is a member of the INTERCOM Museum Leadership Research Team that conducted a global study of museum leadership resulting in publication Museum Leadership: Taking the pulse.
Andrés Roldan
Andrés has 20 years of experience in creating, building, transforming, fundraising and managing museums and cultural institutions. This experience is the result of setting up long term visions of connecting society through the inclusion and integration of diverse communities with science and technology engagement, urban planning, architecture, exhibition design, cultural and educational programs in articulation with stakeholders and community leaders.
Experiences includes interactive science centers, planetariums, aquarium, temporary exhibitions, libraries, cultural centers, learning centers and interpretative centers. Andrés has leaded skilled groups of staff for collaborate with multiple teams representing diverse offering of quality content with specialists in strategic, programmatic, financial and operational management.
As director of a science center Andrés develops financial and ideological support for implementing with balance of diverse interests and skills a vision for the future.
Antje Schmidt
Dr Antje Schmidt is Head of Digital Strategy at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G). In her work she focuses on how to make the holdings of museums more reusable and relevant while diversifing access to and perspectives on museum’s digital collections. In 2015 with the launch of the first collection online she established an open access policy at the MK&G - the first one in a German art museum. In her current role she is acting as a catalyst for the digital transformation of the MK&G and together with her colleagues aims at establishing a sustainable digital museum practice and finding new ways of working together — with communities, within the organisations, with interdisciplinary teams and across museums. Antje has been trained as an art historian and has been a lecturer on digital strategy and museum practice at the universities of Hamburg, Freiburg and Krems (AUT).