Protecting Cultural Property: Speaker Biographies

The Kernochan Center's Art Law Symposium Protecting Cultural Property: The 1954 Hague Convention at 70 was held March 1, 2024, at Columbia Law School.

Prof. Solange Ashby, UCLA

Solange Ashby received her Ph.D. in Egyptology with a specialization in ancient Egyptian language and Nubian religion from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ashby’s expertise in sacred ancient languages including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Coptic, Ethiopic, Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa and the Middle East. Her first book, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, explores the temple of Philae’s history as a Nubian sacred site. Her current research describes the roles of women – queens, priestesses, mothers – in traditional Nubian religious practices.

She is a founding member of the William Leo Hansberry Society which seeks to create pathways for people of African descent – on the continent and in the diaspora – to engage in the study of African antiquity.

Prof. Brian Daniels, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Brian I. Daniels is director of research and programs for the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, adjunct assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania anthropology graduate group, visiting professor in the Sustainable Cultural Heritage Graduate Program at the American University of Rome, and research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. His research centers around three concerns: (1) conflict, cultural loss, and human rights violations; (2) community-based approaches to cultural heritage preservation; and (3) indigenous rights and recognition. Currently, Dr. Daniels leads the National Science Foundation-supported Conflict Culture Research Network, a group of scholars at fifteen international universities and research organizations focused on the study of intentional cultural destruction. He has received the Society for American Archaeology's Presidential Recognition Award for his efforts to protect Syrian and Iraqi cultural heritage and the Lynn Reyer Award in Tribal Community Development from the Society for the Preservation of American Indian Culture for his work with the Shasta Indian communities of northern California. He previously served as the manager of the National Endowment for the Humanities regional center initiative at San Francisco State University, where he worked on strategies for public engagement and the digital humanities.

Samuel Franco Arce, Cultural Rescue Center, Guatemala

Samuel Franco Arce, a Guatemalan Sound Engineer and Videographer, has been conducting activities related to Cultural Property Protection since the early 80’s, as a Founder/Director of Casa K’ojom,a documentation center in Antigua Guatemala that has created a significant audio visual archive and exhibit of the Maya Communities Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage. Since 2009, has been a consultant and trainer of ICCROM’s SOIMA (Safeguarding Sound and Image), and FAC (First Aid to Cultural Heritage in times of Crisis) courses in Latin America and The Caribbean. 

Currently he is the Director of the CER (Cultural Emergency Response) regional Hub for Latin America and The Caribbean, implementing DRM activities with the UNESCO regional offices, and advocating for the creation of Blue Shield National Committees in the region.  He is the Project Advisor for the “Shared Island Stories”, research project coordinated by the University of St. Andrews of Scotland and The Caribbean, and also Project Advisor of the NET ZERO “Climate, Culture and Peace” project of ICCROM.

His contribution to ICOM the International Council of Museums as a member, has been as a President of ICOM Guatemala (2008-2013), President of the Regional Alliance ICOM-LAC (2016-2019), and currently Board member of ICOM DRMC, the International Committee of Disaster Resilient Museums.

Prof. Patty Gerstenblith, DePaul College of Law

Patty Gerstenblith is Distinguished Research Professor of Law at DePaul University and Director of its Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to serve as Chair of the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the Department of State on which she had previously served as a Public Representative in the Clinton administration. Since 2020, she has served as President of the Board of Directors of the US Committee of the Blue Shield and Chair of the Blue Shield International Working Group on Countering Trafficking of Cultural Objects. She lectures and publishes widely in the United States and internationally on the protection of cultural property during armed conflict, preservation of archaeological heritage, and the trade in archaeological and other cultural objects. Her book, Cultural Objects and Reparative Justice: A Legal and Historical Analysis, was published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2023. The fourth edition of her casebook, Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law, was published in 2019. She is founding president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (2005-2011), a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, an Expert for the Fulbright Specialist Project at the Department of Antiquities of Jordan in 2019, the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College in 2021, a member of the American Bar Association’s International Art and Cultural Heritage Law steering committee, and the Archaeological Institute of America’s Charles Eliot Norton National Lecturer for the 2023/24 academic year. Gerstenblith received her AB from Bryn Mawr College, PhD in art history and anthropology from Harvard University, JD from Northwestern University and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Before joining the DePaul law faculty, Gerstenblith clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Prof. Õmür Harmansah, University of Illinois, Chicago

Ömür Harmansah is currently serving as the Director of the School of Art & Art History. His current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, climate justice, place, and cultural heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of ancient Western Asia (a.k.a. the Near East), Harmansah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. His earlier research focused on cities, the production of architectural and urban space, critical studies of place and landscape, building technologies and architectural knowledge, and image-making practices in the urban and rural environments. He is the author of two monographs, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He also edited the volume Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place (Oxbow Books, 2014) and co-edited Scribbling Through History: Graffiti, Places, and People from Antiquity to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is one of the authors of the new global art history survey textbook The History of Art: A Global View. Prehistory to the Present (Thames & Hudson, 2021). For other publications, please consult his academia page.

Harmansah co-directed (with Dr. Peri Johnson) Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a diachronic regional survey and landscape archaeology project addressing questions of the politics of water and borderlands in Konya Province of west-central Turkey (2010-2021). This project was supported by a major Post-PhD grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Humanities Without Walls Consortium, Suna-İnan Kıraç Foundation Research Center on Mediterranean Civilizations, The Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University, and the School of Art and Art History at UIC. Results of this long-term field project are being prepared for publication in the form of a multi-authored monograph.

Harmansah was the Lead Principal Investigator for the 3-year multi-institutional collaborative project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene” (2017-2019). This project was supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project included a master class and a symposium with Bruno Latour in October-November 2017. The project was concluded with the exhibition All have the same breath held at Gallery 400 (January 18-March 9, 2019)

Harmansah is currently working on a new monograph on landscape history and political ecology in the Middle East, addressing the challenges brought about by the debates in environmental humanities, particularly around the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental crisis, with emphasis on landscape archaeology and archaeological field practice. This monograph, tentatively titled Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Archaeology, Politics, and Heritage in the Middle East (under contract with Routledge), brings together fieldwork-based insights from current debates in new materialism and political ecology to discuss the precarity of archaeological landscapes and cultural heritage under the impact of late capitalism.

Born and raised in Turkey, Harmansah studied architecture and architectural history at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), and received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania in the History of Art (2005). He previously taught at Reed College (Portland, OR) and Brown University (Providence, RI) before joining the faculty at UIC’s School of Art & Art History in 2014. He received various sabbatical and research awards, including Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Senior Fellowship (twice, 2009-2010 and 2019-2020), Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (Fall 2012), and University of Texas at Austin’s Donald D. Harrington Faculty Research Fellowship (2013-2014). He was elected as a “Rising Star” in Art, Architecture, and the Humanities in 2016 by UIC's Office of the Vice Chancellor.

Cathy Kaplan, Columbia Law School

Cathy M Kaplan is a retired partner at Sidley Austin LLP New York in the Global Finance Group. While at Sidley Cathy focused her practice on a wide range of structured finance products and art related matters. Cathy served on the firm Executive Committee and as head of the Global Finance Group. Cathy continues to help curate the extensive art collection in Sidley’s New York office.

Cathy currently consults and represents collectors, artists, galleries and art institutions in art related matters. She is Chair of the Board of Aperture Foundation and Co-Chair of the Photography Committee for the Whitney Museum. She is also on the Governing Board of the Yale University Art Gallery and chairs the Board’s nominating committee. Cathy chairs the Board of Visitors at Columbia Law School. She served for eight years on the Board of Her Justice and now serves on its Senior Advisory board and also serves on the Board of the Bronx Council on the Arts.

In 2022 Cathy was honored by the New York Law Journal with the Lifetime Achievement award in recognition of her accomplishments and impact on the legal community.

Cathy earned her J.D. from Columbia University and her B.A. from Yale University.

Birgit Kurtz, Responsible Art Market Initiative

Birgit Kurtz is an attorney in New York City with more than 25 years of experience representing clients in international commercial disputes. She has also worked as an Ethics & Compliance Consultant at a SaaS company and served as a Fellow at the World Economic Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative – PACI.

In addition to a German law degree and a U.S. Juris Doctor, Ms. Kurtz earned an LL.M., magna cum laude, in Corporate Compliance. She frequently publishes and speaks on various issues, including international dispute resolution, ESG and art law. Ms. Kurtz also co-chairs the NY Regional Committee of the Responsible Art Market Initiative – RAM, a non-profit, cross market initiative formed in Geneva in 2015, the mission of which is to raise awareness of risks faced by the art industry and to provide practical guidance and a platform for the sharing of best practices to address those risks.

Prof. Federico Lenzerini, University of Siena

Federico Lenzerini is an Associate Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Department of Political and International Sciences (DISPI) at the University of Siena. He is also Professor at the LLM programme in Intercultural Human Rights at the St. Thomas University School of Law, Miami (FL), USA, and Professor at the Tulane-Siena Summer School on International Law, Cultural Heritage and the Arts.

He is the Director of the Inter-University Centre for the Research on Human Rights and Immigration Law (CIRDUIS); Member of the Disciplinary Board of the University of Siena; Representative of the University of Siena at the Italian “Network of Universities for Peace” (RUNIPACE); Delegate of the Rector of the University of Siena for the Project “Just Peace”; Referee of the University of Siena for the UNHCR’s Manifesto of the Inclusive University for Refugees; Member of the Commission of Research of the University of Siena; and Delegate of the Department of Political and International Sciences of the University of Siena for Research, Quality of Research and the Third Mission.

He has been Consultant to UNESCO (Paris) and Counsel to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for international negotiations related to cultural heritage.

He was the Rapporteur of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Rapporteur of the ILA Committee on the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He is currently Deputy Head of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Royal Commission of Inquiry. 

He has been visiting professor in several foreign universities, including the University of Texas in Austin, the Charles University of Prague, the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, the Universities of Wellington and Waikato Te Piringa, in New Zealand, the University of Tulane in New Orleans, the Romanian-American University in Bucharest, and the Central European University in Budapest.

He has been a Professor at the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute in Fiesole and is a member of the editorial committees of The Italian Yearbook of International Law, the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review, and the editorial series Cultural Heritage Law and Policy (Oxford University Press). He has published seven books (including two monographs) and over 100 academic articles.

Jane Levine, Columbia Law School

Jane Levine is the Chief Compliance Officer of DailyPay, the industry-leading technology platform that's disrupting the financial system. Prior to joining the Executive Office team at DailyPay, Jane was the Chief Global Compliance Counsel at NYSE-listed Sotheby’s where she also handled government and regulatory affairs and was a member of the Executive Management Committee. At Sotheby’s, Jane drove the creation of the Global Risk Committee and Global Compliance Committee, in addition to leading the company’s key business compliance practices globally.

Previous to Sotheby’s, Jane spent 10 years as an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) with the Southern District of New York where she prosecuted many high-profile white collar crimes, including theft, fraud and illegal trafficking in antiquities and cultural heritage. While serving as an AUSA, Jane was awarded the John Marshall Award, the Chief Postal Inspectors Award, and the U.S. Customs Award for Outstanding Service.  Earlier in her career, Jane was an attorney with firms Paul Weiss and Proskauer. Jane is currently an adjunct lecturer at Columbia Law School, teaching a seminar on art and cultural heritage.   Jane was a Presidential Appointee under President Obama to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee overseeing the implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention.  Jane is a frequent speaker on anti-money laundering and financial crimes in the art and antiquities markets as well as on compliance subjects.  Jane is a member of the Advisory Board for NYU Law School’s Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement and supports the important work of this center.

Jane is a founding board member of Beyond #Metoo, a Working group on Corporate Governance, Compliance, and Risk dedicated to understanding the root causes of workplace harassment, discrimination, and misconduct and deploying the insights gained through the #MeToo movement to foster optimal corporate structures that prevent workplace misconduct and abuses of power. Jane also serves on the Mentoring Committee for the “When There are Nine Scholarship Project, established in 2020 in partnership with the Federal Bar Foundation by a group of women attorneys who served together as Assistant United States Attorneys in the Southern District of New York. The Project’s mission is to honor the lifelong work of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by creating a scholarship and related programming that will advance equity and diversity within the legal profession and continue the late Justice’s many efforts to expand career opportunities for women attorneys.

Jane is a graduate of Brown University and New York University School of Law.

Pippa Loengard, Columbia Law School

Philippa Loengard joined the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School in 2006.

Her research focuses on issues surrounding the visual arts and entertainment industries. She is particularly interested in issues of taxation as they pertain to the arts and the rights of authors and creators. Loengard is the Chair of the Copyright Division of the ABA.  She also serves as the Chair of the Artists' Rights subcommittee of the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association. She was in private practice at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel before joining the Kernochan Center staff.

An interest in intellectual property issues as they related to her work in documentary film provoked her return to law school. Prior to attending law school, Loengard worked in television production for several years as an assistant director on multiple shows and also as a coordinating producer for A&E Television Networks.

She is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar and an article editor for the Journal of Law and the Arts. Loengard holds an LL.M. from New York University School of Law. Loengard graduated with a master’s degree from Stanford University, where she was the 1994 recipient of the Karl A. and Medira Bickel Fellowship, and has a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.

Roksolana Makar, Wall Evidence Project

Roksolana Makar is an art historian, writer and researcher from Kyiv, Ukraine. Since September 2022, she has been an on-site documentation expert with the Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab. Her work is focused on the Forensic Heritage documentation aimed at collecting evidence of crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage. Additionally, she takes part in a research group of the Raphael Lemkin Society and leads the content direction of the Wall Evidence project, an open archive of Russian graffiti in Ukraine. 

Nicholas O’Donnell, Sullivan & Worcester LLP

Nick’s practice focuses primarily on complex civil litigation, for which he has appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States. He represents corporations, employers, individuals, investment advisers, banks, and others around the world in contract, employment, securities, consumer protection, tort and domestic relations cases, with particular experience in the German-speaking world. He is also the editor of the Art Law Report, a blog that provides timely updates and commentary on legal issues in the museum and visual arts communities, one of his areas of expertise. Nick is one of the leading practitioners in the United States in matters concerning claims to allegedly Nazi-looted works of art.

Nick is the Co-Chair of the Art, Cultural Property and Heritage Law Committee of the International Bar Association and co-chair of the New York chapter of the Responsible Art Market Initiative, as well as a member of the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.

Additionally, Nick has authored and contributed to several books on art law:: Museums and the Holocaust (Second Edition, Institute of Art and Law, 2021); A Tragic Fate—Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-Looted Art, (Ankerwyke/ABA Publishing, 2017); “Public Trust or Private Business? Deaccessioning Law and Ethics in the United States,” in Éthique et Patrimoine Culturel - Regard Croisés, G. Goffaux, ed., (L’Harmattan, 2016); “Vergangenheit als Zukunft?  Restitutionsstreitigkeiten in den Vereinigten Staaen,” in Ersessene Kunst—Der Fall Gurlitt, J. Heil and A. Weber, eds., (Metropol, 2015); “Nazi-Looted Art—Risks and Best Practices for Museums,” in The Legal Guide for Museum Professionals, Julia Courtney, ed., (2015, Rowman & Littlefield)

Fahim Rahimi, National Museum of Afghanistan

Mr. Rahimi received bachelor’s degree from Archeology and Anthropology department of Kabul University in 2005 and Master’s Degree from Anthropology Department of University of Pennsylvania in 2016 through a Fulbright scholarship, focused in Archeology and heritage preservation.  In 2007, he joined the National Museum of Afghanistan as curator and was raised to Chief Curator of this museum in 2013. In the National Museum of Afghanistan, besides his daily curatorial work, he has been the curator for several large-scale exhibitions, including Mes Aynak - Recent Discoveries Along the Silk Route Exhibition, Buddhist Heritage of Afghanistan Exhibition, and 1000 Cities of Bactria.

In 2010, he participated in an international heritage preservation course called First Aid to Cultural Heritages in Times of Conflict at the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome, Italy. In 2011, he participated in a curatorial training course on the art and history of Afghanistan and Pakistan at
Vienna University in Austria.

He has been director of the National Museum of Afghanistan and professionally leads the whole museums of the country. His main tasks were drafting policies for the museum, facilitating organizing exhibitions in national and international level, securing budgeting and funding for the museum, facilitating collection enrichment and its preservation in the country, and returning of the looted artifacts from Afghanistan. Besides that, he has been a mentor for the “Regional Course on Cultural Heritage First Aid, Peace and Resilience in Times of Crisis” that was organized by ICCROM from March 15th – August 30th 2021.

Currently, he has established and leads a non-profit organization called Cultural Heritage of Afghanistan Conservation and Research Institute (CHACRI). Through this organization, he focuses on preservation of the heritages (tangible and intangible), research on the heritage and capacity-building of the heritage workers in Afghanistan.

Prof. James Reap, University of Georgia

James K. Reap is a Professor in the Master of Historic Preservation Program. He is director of the University of Georgia Croatia Study Abroad Program (2007-13, 2018-) and is an affiliated faculty member of the UGA African Studies Institute. Professor Reap taught law and heritage conservation as a Fulbright Scholar at the Jordan University of Science and Technologyand as a visiting professor at the  Orenburg Institute of the Moscow State Law Academy. In 2016, he was appointed by President Obama to the State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee.

He is the former Program Coordinator of the MHP program, President and current Secretary General of the Committee on Legal, Administrative and Financial Issues and a member of the Committee on Shared Built Heritage of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and a Fellow and Legal Advisor ofUS/ICOMOS, serving on the Executive Committee. He has worked on preservation issues in Eastern and Southern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the Caribbean.

Professor Reap is currently a board member of the United States Committee of the Blue Shield and a past board member of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and Preservation Action. He has provided training and technical assistance to preservation commissions throughout the United States. Professor Reap has served as chair of the preservation commissions in the City of Decatur and DeKalb County and as vice chair in Athens, Georgia. He is a founding member of both the Georgia Alliance and National Alliance of Preservation Commissions, and is a former board member of both organizations. He has served previously as President of the Athens (Georgia) Historical Society and the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation (now Historic Athens).

His background in planning includes service as Georgia’s first regional preservation planner and as Deputy Executive Director of the Northeast Georgia Area Planning and Development Commission (now Northeast Georgia Regional Commission). He has served in several Georgia state agencies including Departments of Archives and History, Natural Resources, and Technical and Adult Education (now the Technical College System of Georgia).

Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s

Lucian Simmons, Vice Chairman and Worldwide Head of Sotheby’s Restitution Department and Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Sotheby’s New York, joined Sotheby’s in 1995. Lucian works extensively with art collectors and their advisors throughout North America and Europe and has been involved in the sale of some of the most significant artworks to come to auction in recent years including Onement VI by Barnett Newman (sold for $43.8m in May 2013) and Bildnis Gertha Felsöványi by Gustav Klimt (sold for £24.8m in June 2015). He has worked on restitution and provenance issues since 1997 and has been involved in the resolution of claims to art works worth in excess of $850 million.

He was called to the Bar in 1984 and later re-qualified as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. He was a partner in the London City Law Firm of Barlow, Lyde and Gilbert prior to joining Sotheby's. He is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.

Mr. Simmons has spoken widely on art market issues and in particular on the displacement of art during WWII. Mr. Simmons has been interviewed on the subject on television and radio and has appeared in a number of film documentaries. He gives regular seminars at universities and law schools across North America and has given evidence to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport of the House of Commons, London, to the European Parliament, Brussels, and to the Prague Conference on Holocaust Era Assets.

Corine Wegener, Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative

Corine Wegner is the 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.

Wegener’s connection to Smithsonian began with the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project, where she served as international project coordinator for the preservation of more than 30,000 objects of Haitian heritage after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Before her arrival to the Smithsonian, Wegener was an associate curator in the department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In her 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. Now retired from the Army Reserve, she continues to serve on the board of the Civil Affairs Association and organizes regular military cultural heritage awareness events at Smithsonian. In 2006, Corine founded the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, part of an international organization dedicated to raising awareness of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the event of Armed Conflict. Her efforts led to the U.S. ratification of this important treaty in 2009.

Wegener lectures and writes about the importance of cultural property protection during natural disasters and armed conflict. 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.