Agnes believes that museums are relevant to people and that participation supports cultural institutions to be relevant to visitors and users. She is interested in knowledge based technological solutions and cultural and economic creativity that heritage can support.

Agnes Aljas is a Research Secretary of the Estonian National Museum. She has studied history, ethnology and communication (University of Tartu, University of Turku and University of Aix-en-Provence).

Agnes is giving lectures on memory institutions at the University of Tartu. Her research interests and recent publications focus on audience studies, cultural participation and contemporary collecting. She was part of the team of the new building project of the Estonian National Museum (EMYA 2018, Kenneth Hudson Award).

Agnes is the chair of ICOM Estonia and a board member of ICOM’s International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME). She joined the EMYA judging panel in January 2021.

Sharon believes that museums matter because they can enhance our health and wellbeing, create better places for us to live and work and provide space where we can interrogate the big issues of the day.

Sharon is the director of the Museums Association, a campaigning membership body that promotes the value of museums to society.

She regularly comments on museums and cultural policy in the UK; speaks at conferences and events in the UK and internationally; and has published extensively. She lectures in the history of museums, museum ethics and museums and social impact and activism.

Sharon is the chair of the Museum of Homelessness and a trustee of the Thackray Museum of Medicine.

Amina Krvavac is the Executive Director at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Amina was a member of a small inaugural team that led a two-year grassroots campaign culminating in the opening of the War Childhood Museum back in 2017. The War Childhood Museum has since been widely recognised and praised for its capacity to contribute to a better understanding of war-affected childhood as a complex social phenomenon.
Amina studied International Relations at the International University of Sarajevo, and Children’s Rights at the University of Geneva.

She is committed to creating exhibitions and workshops that support open and conscious dialogue, and to promoting the idea of museums as platforms for societal healing and reconciliation.

Amina is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Coalition of Site of Conscience Europe – a network of museums, historic sites and memory initiatives connecting past struggles to today’s movement for human rights. She joined the EMYA Judging Panel in January 2021 and served as Chair of the Jury from 2022 to May 2025, when she assumed the role of the Chair of the Board of Trustees.

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 joined the EMYA judging panel in 2023.

Adriana is interested in the relationship between museums as institutions and the current political situation around the world, in how museums construct discourses and ideology using collections and objects, and what their underlying purposes are.

Adriana Muñoz is a curator at the National Museums of World Culture, Sweden. She wrote her PhD in Archaeology about the relationship between collecting, labelling and political structures. She has long experience of working in museums and has worked on numerous exhibitions.

She works with ICOM (International Council of Museums) on problems around the illegal import/export of archaeological plundered objects from Latin America. Further, she has participated in several research projects in different countries since 1998 and has collaborated with a number of universities in Europe and Latin American, not only concerning archaeology, but also questions of heritage. She is a member of Americanist and museological groups; and a referee for the Journal of Museum Management (Canada) and for the Nordisk museologi (Scandinavian), as well as for the Argentinian Fund for Scientific Research and Technology. Recently she has also worked with questions of repatriation.

Adriana served as an EMYA Judge from 2019 to 2025, and in May 2025, she was designated a member of the EMF Board of Trustees.

Museums must facilitate processes that fulfill the needs of communities around them, supporting communities to engage with the world around them.

As the former CEO of Dolhuys Foundation Hans led the Museum of the Mind and created its’ second location; Museum of the Mind Amsterdam, which challenges the existing hierarchies and narratives to widen our understanding and appreciation in art. Outsiderart has far too long been rejected, overlooked and excluded, as have their artists and makers. The renewed Museum of the Mind, Dolhuys Haarlem engages with the public at large through art and health programs. It has an extensive partner program, ranging from healthcare institutions to museums, with partnerships and projects in the Netherlands and beyond. The Museum of the Mind won the European Museum of the Year Award 2022.

As a museologist, Hans studied in Amsterdam and Oaxaca, Mexico. Based on social commitment, he puts his heart and soul into making a difference. From his daily work at the two museums he knows what difference putting a case forward can make in peoples’ lives. Funding, strategy, empowering and supporting personal development of -lived experienced- volunteers and staff alike, program, public, these are all within his attention span. Hans has extensive experience as a cultural entrepreneur from earlier in his career and spent over a decade creating museum- and other meaningful information environments.

Hans is also Chair of the Willem van Genk Foundation, advisor to the Outsiderart Gallery Amsterdam, Chair of the Anton Heyboer Foundation, Member of the Committee on NIOD Research into 2nd World War victims in Dutch psychiatry. Next to this he lectured museology a as visiting professor in an international environment.

For Léontine museums are essentially networks, connecting communities and institutions. This requires building trust which is only possible when adopting a policy of transparency. As such museum could (and should) contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

Léontine is a Dutch museologist and director and CEO of Museum Rotterdam. Previously she was the director of the State Ethnographical Collections of Saxony (i.e. the ethnographical museums of Dresden, Leipzig and Herrnhut) and deputy director general of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

She is active in the boards of several museum organizations. She was, among others, member of the Executive Board of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and founding president of the International Committee for Collecting (COMCOL). She is, among others, chair of the Dutch Slavery Heritage Education Foundation.

Important among Léontine’s academic and professional interests are the theory and practice of professionalism and professional ethics. She was lecturer of heritage theory and professional ethics at the Reinwardt Academie (Amsterdam) and is at present chair of the ICOM Ethics Committee.

She became a member of the EMF Board of Trustees in 2024.

Interim Director-General of ICOM - International Council of Museums. Medea S. Ekner is a future-oriented museum and leadership strategist, with an academic background in critical museology and art history.

Her interest in the museum as phenomenon, in a past, present, and future context, has driven her into change-management to explore the museum as design and experience, with focus on its social roles and responsibilities.

With a keen interest in the synergies between museums, academia, and industry, she has used the museum as a place of innovation to experiment with new technologies to enhance audience experiences and promote social change.

As a leadership developer and course leader in Sweden's most sought-after leadership training program, she has a genuine interest in leadership and contributes to the museum sector with perspectives on transformative leadership that stimulate participation and creativity as well as development and change.

In her role as interim Director-General of ICOM, she works with passion for international cooperation between museums, the promotion and protection of global cultural heritage and bringing forward the common interests of museums at high-level forums such as the G20 and the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Michał is an architecture historian interested in space, history and political relations. He is a Head of the Educational Department – Academy of Heritage of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow responsible for various long-term projects dedicated to heritage interpretation and management in relation to the context of Central Europe. He teaches urban history and city studies-related courses at the University of Economics in Krakow. Fulbright scholarship holder.

Author of many scientific and popularizing publications on the architecture of Krakow and Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. Member of the board of the Institute of Architecture Foundation. Co-author of exhibitions and publications created by the team of the Institute of Architecture Foundation including the website Krakowski Szlak Modernizmu (Krakow Trace of Modernism): szlakmodernizmu.pl

He joined the EMF Board of Trustees in 2024.