Agnes believes that museums are relevant when they engage meaningfully with people’s lives. Participation, including digital participation, plays a key role in making museum collections, knowledge, and practices accessible, engaging, and useful to diverse audiences. Her work explores how knowledge-based technological solutions and cultural as well as economic creativity can be supported and inspired by heritage.

Agnes Aljas is the research secretary at the Estonian National Museum. She has an academic background in history, ethnology, and communication, having studied at the University of Tartu, the University of Turku, and the University of Aix-en-Provence.

Agnes lectures on museology at universities in Estonia. Her research explores audience engagement, cultural and digital participation, contemporary collecting, and the impact of museums and technological change. She was part of the core team behind the new building project of the Estonian National Museum, which received the EMYA Kenneth Hudson Award in 2018.

Agnes is a member of ICOM SAREC and serves on the editorial board of Museum International. She has been serving as a judge since the EMYA2022 edition.

Atle is a curious guy. And when he visits a museum, he is very often discovering something he didn´t knew he likes.

Atle Faye has newly retired after being the head of communications & pr at the Oslo National Academy of the arts. He has also been director of information at the former Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority and head of communications at the National Museum.

He lives in Oslo and Berlin and is particularly interested in young contemporary art, politics and urban development and how important a new museum project can be for the development of a district or region.

Faye was a member of the jury for several years and this year he is once again re-entering the jury for the EMYA2027 competition in connection with the high number of candidates to be visited and juried.

Beat believes that museums have a creative power to launch debates, to open doors and to involve people. Just do it.

Beat Hächler is the director and curator at the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern, Switzerland. He studied contemporary history (focus on Spain), German literature and media science in Bern and Madrid, followed by a master’s degree program in scenography in Zurich some years later.

He is interested in contemporary every day life issues and co-developped under these aspects over 18 years the profile of Stapferhaus Lenzburg (EMYA winner 2020). In Bern, he transformed the Swiss Alpine Museum since 2011 with a temporary exhibition hall, opening new perspectives beyond the Alps for global issues. Since 2020 he is part of an experimental transformation process, shaping the local existing museum cluster into a new collaborative museum’s quarter.

Beat was a board member of ICOM Switzerland and he is still active as author and curator reflecting contemporary museological practices.

His judging work began with the EMYA2023 edition.

For Nayat, the most meaningful cultural work emerges where remembrance, justice, and public engagement intersect. Her perspective is shaped by years of working with communities navigating difficult histories, and she places particular emphasis on how memory practices can open space for dialogue, empathy, and shared understanding.

Nayat holds a BA in Sociology from Galatasaray University and an MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex. Her academic background includes fellowships at Columbia University (Historical Dialogue and Accountability, 2014) and the University of Washington (Humphrey Fellowship on Media and Information, 2021). Her previous experience includes serving as a Program Officer for the UK charity Global Dialogue and working as a freelance journalist for Agos newspaper from 2010 to 2015.

Since 2015, she works as Director of Programmes at the Hrant Dink Foundation, where she oversees strategic planning, organisational management, international networking, and the full lifecycle of major projects on hate speech, co-existence, minority rights, human rights, cultural heritage, and Türkiye–Armenia relations.

In addition to her other roles, Nayat is responsible for the coordination of the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory, the first memory site in Türkiye dedicated to the slain Armenian journalist and founder of the Turkish–Armenian Agos newspaper, Hrant Dink. Addressing the past, collective memory, and practices of memorialisation are among her areas of expertise.

She has been serving as a judge since the EMYA2027 edition.

Danielle is interested in developments that challenge existing concepts of collecting. Her work is very much around networks and participation. She is a strong advocate for collecting practices that centres the care for people.

Danielle Kuijten holds a Master of Museology from the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts). She started her museum career as freelancer in the heritage field under the name Heritage Concepting.

Her main focus in projects is on co-ccreation, contemporary collecting, action curating and decolonization of museum praxis. This is also how she started working for Imagine IC, a pioneer in the field of heritage of the contemporary society. Here she has been active in building a participative neighbourhood archive on and in the Amsterdam district Southeast. As co-curator she produced exhibitions on topics like Black Resistance, Queering Southeast and Personal archives of 25 year Bijlmer Flightdisaster. In 2022 she was guest-curator of the first DOMiDlabs: Making Museum Design Participatory in Cologne, Germany. The labs aims to help DOMiD to create a multifaceted and engaging migration museum. Since March of 2023 she is director at Imagine IC.

Danielle is a regular guest on international conferences giving presentations and workshops and is president at COMCOL, ICOM’s international committee for collecting. She has been part of the EMYA jury since the EMYA2024 judging cycle.

Mahret believes museums and cultural spaces can reveal hidden narratives and challenge entrenched power structures, enabling nuanced dialogues about memory, representation, and decolonial practices in art, design and material culture.

Mahret Ifeoma Kupka is an art scholar, freelance writer, and since 2013 senior curator at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Her curatorial and scholarly work—including exhibitions, lectures, publications, and interdisciplinary collaborations—centres on interrogating knowledge systems, representation, and the decolonization of art, design, and cultural production in Europe and Africa. She is part of the curatorial team of TALKING OBJECTS LAB, serves on the advisory board of TEXTE ZUR KUNST, and is a founding member of Neue Deutsche Museumsmacher*innen, a network of BIPoC museum professionals in Germany. In addition, she contributes her expertise to international juries, scientific panels, and search committees.

In 2023 and 2024, Kupka taught design theory in the Experimental Clothing and Textile Design department at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and in 2024 and 2025 she held a guest professorship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. She studied Economics at Heidelberg University before completing her doctorate in art and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where she also pursued studies in art and media theory, philosophy, curatorial practice, and exhibition design.

She joined the jury for the EMYA2027 cycle.

Dominika is interested in how museums interpret the changes that occur in the culture of any given land and how new technologies affect the image of a museum.

Dominika Mroczkowska-Rusiniak is a cultural manager. She studied cross-cultural psychology at the University of Social Science and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland and history at the University of Warsaw and Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. She also obtained a post-graduate diploma at Warsaw School of Economics, Poland.

Among other professional engagements, she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the National Museum in Warsaw. Since 2016 she has been working at the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections, where she manages an education project and co-organizes various museum award schemes.

She has been a long time national correspondent for EMF. She also lectures at the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies at Warsaw University.

Her judging work began with the EMYA2023 edition.

Joan is interested (and believes) in museum as an essential community infrastructure, with a potential and promising active role beyond heritage management and identity representation.

Joan Seguí is the director and curator of L’ETNO, the Valencian Museum of Ethnology (EMYA winner in 2023) in the city of València (Spain). He was born and raised in a small mountain village and studied history in the University of Valencia. He later moved to University of Leicester (UK) to do his MA and a PhD in ethnoarchaeology. Working from L’ENTO, he has been involved in the world of local museums all his professional life. He is particularly interested in ethnographic heritage and the role of local museums as active actors for the development of their communities. He also enjoys experiencing new developments in museography across all range of museums.

He has been a member of the Spanish ICOM board between 2011 and 2017. He has been serving as a judge since the EMYA2025 edition.

Born in Canada and raised in Greece, Mathieu is interested in cross-cultural studies of museums in contemporary contexts. He sees museums - of any kind - as inclusive spaces that enable and empower diversity and generate meaningful social experiences.

Mathieu has over 15 years of international experience across national museums and universities. He has held roles including director of the Centre for Museum Information and Cooperation at the University of Burgundy and lecturer at the University of Lorraine in France, research track leader at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, and researcher at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec, Canada. He is also an honorary research fellow at the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester. His fieldwork includes extensive research in South America, particularly in Bolivia and Brazil, as well as regular research collaborations in Spain, particularly in Catalunya and the Basque Country. At the International Council of Museums (ICOM), he served on the board of Museum International from 2017 to 2023. His publications focus on co-curation, managerial curatorship, organisational theory, museum activism, memory and postmemory, and citizen participation. Mathieu received his PhD in 2011 from the School of World Art Studies and Museology, University of East Anglia, UK.

His judging work began with the EMYA2023 edition.

Zandra Yeaman believes museums have the power to shape our understanding of the past, how this has developed our present, to enable us to create an equitable future for all.

Zandra Yeaman is the Curator of Discomfort at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. She has a background in anti-racist activism in Scotland, working for social justice and equality.

Previously, Zandra was the Community Campaigns Officer for the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, responsible for coordinating Black History Month events programme in Scotland. For more than a decade, she has assisted the Scottish arts and heritage sector, helping to question working practices, involve new audiences and ensure that anti-racism, equality and diversity is at the heart of all they do.

The Hunterian’ s Curating Discomfort programme was devised in 2021 to challenge historical power dynamics and, through ‘uncomfortable’ processes, empower new forms of collaboration between community groups, museum professionals and academics.

International recognition for ‘Curating Discomfort’ has shaped a new project, ‘Power in This Place: Unfinished Conversations’ (2022-2025) that seeks to develop further the process of change at The Hunterian.

Zandra’s work uses the museum’s collections to create narratives that no longer privilege colonisers but re-frame interpretation and acknowledge and represent our shared histories.

Exploring the legacies of Empire, Zandra works in collaboration to remove white supremacy as an economic and cultural basis through which white western ideas have exercised cultural superiority through control of knowledge, text, and institutional resources.

Zandra is the Chair of the Board of Directors at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, and is a member of the board of Directors at V&A Dundee, Scotland.

Her judging work began with the EMYA2024 edition.