Supervisory Committee

In the 1990s, I was guide for a company that organized walking tours around Europe. I had worked for a while in a Nature Visitor Centre in the National City Park of Stockholm. With a fresh exam in biology and earth sciences from Stockholm University and a true environmentalist, I thought it was a great job. It gave me a chance to connect people with local nature and talk about global questions such as climate change, biodiversity loss and the growing movement of Agenda 21 (following the Rio-conference in 1992). The European job offered discovery of the nature and culture of landscapes in Brittany (France), Madeira (Portugal), The Channel Islands (UK), Austria and my favourite: a two weeks tour on mainland Greece – and lots of experience-based knowledge and a strong interest in the practice of guiding.

Back in Stockholm, I worked for the NGO, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, with campaigns for urban biodiversity and with environmental education in the Skansen Outdoor Museum. It encompassed visitor studies in protected areas for the Stockholm County Administration and websites (new then!) for people who wanted to discover nature close to the city. The ambition was to instill a sense of belonging and ownership to places and was a strategic part of the protection of the green wedges stretching towards the centre of Stockholm from the surroundings. A number of people from the University were contracted as guides for the Greater Stockholm Area Nature Guides. We organized training and invited Sven Hultman (who had studied interpretation in the US in the 1960s) to introduce interpretation to the group. The word and world of interpretation was new to me. And it was good news! I realized that there was a professional culture – and theory – for what I had been doing for so long.

Since 2008, I have been head of the Centre for Nature Interpretation at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. I am engaged in education and development of interpretation and am particularly interested (still!) in how nature interpretation might contribute to well-informed commitment to nature conservation and sustainable development. We have a strong collaboration with people involved in nature interpretation in the Nordic countries. I was the main editor and one of the authors of Nature interpretation in the Nordic countries – a book about experiences, learning, reflection and participation when people and nature meet (PDF Nordic council of ministers 2020).

I am an IE Certified Interpretive Guide and Trainer and have been a member of interpret Europe since 2010. In 2013 our Centre, Interpret Europe and the National Association for Interpretation organized an international conference in Sweden. Many great lecturers and professionals in the field joined us. The theme of the conference was ‘Interpretation can make us citizens of world’ – an idea that in my opinion is more relevant than ever today.

I come from a family of storytellers, tellers of tall tales and recounters of family lore. My grandfather was a guide in Stirling Castle, being my hometown, so I guess Interpretation unbeknownst to me, has been in my blood. Bringing nature to life, sharing its stories and being its voice and “interpreter” has been an important thread woven throughout my career. I have worked in the environment arena in Scotland from the ground, training as an Ecologist and Teacher, bringing nature to life as Ranger, Park Manager and until recently, CEO of the EUROPARC Federation. I was on of the early initiators and supports of the Scottish Interpretation Network and have always followed the work of Interpret Europe personally and professionally.Now as Programme Manager of the Central Scotland Green Network I remain and advocate of interpretation and good effective communications. Being too an acolyte of Patrick Geddes and his “Place, Folk, Work “philosophy, connecting people and place. Given my international and local perspectives, working too within the approach he coined to Think Global but Act Local.

I am the director of the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Museum in Warsaw, leading a deep institutional transformation and developing a new permanent exhibition using an interpretive approach. I am deeply fascinated by the history of women and am committed to bringing their stories into the spotlight. Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s story is the extraordinatory example —she was a woman who overcame every obstacle and changed the world as we know it. Together with my team, I want to share this story in a way that inspires our visitors, showing them that curiosity, perseverance and passion can shape the future.

Previously, I worked as a Head of Education at the Józef Piłsudski Museum in Sulejówek where I played a key role in shaping the museum from its inception. Passionate about heritage interpretation, I hold CIP, CIG and trainer certifications. In 2022 and 2023, I secured Erasmus+ funding to enable 30 museum professionals to participate in the Certified Interpretive Guide (CIG) courses in Croatia. Since 2024, I have served as the Country Coordinator for Interpret Europe in Poland, supporting the development of interpretation in the country.

I love my work as a trainer and, beyond my role as a director, I continue to pursue my passion for interpretation and education. I lecture in postgraduate museum studies at the University of Warsaw and train professionals through Echocast, a practice-oriented program for customer service in heritage institutions. Lifelong learning is central to my work – I completed postgraduate studies in cultural heritage protection at the Warsaw University of Technology and attended the Women’s Leadership Academy LiderShe at Kozminski University. I have twice been awarded a Ministry of Culture and National Heritage scholarship – first to create a biographical website on painter Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska (www.mewalunkiewicz.pl) and later to write a guide on designing interpretive panels at heritage sites which I also taught in workshops.

Outside of work, I love exploring the world – whether by bike, ski, kayak, sailboat or on foot. Museums, wild waters and open skies are my favorite places to be.

I was groomed to follow my father as president of a substantial family business and was brought-up in a country estate’s mansion with lots of old stuff around, this last feature interested me far more. Therefore, after finalising my business economy studies and working a blue Monday with today’s KPMG, I moved to the world of cultural heritage. First, I worked parttime and for nearly a quarter of a century since as a fulltime heritage professional.

Since the late eighties, I have been involved in quite a wide scope of cultural heritage projects, ranging from establishing an ‘avant la lettre’ cultural impact investment fund to leading major restoration projects, such as the full restoration of a 17th-century mansion and its garden in the Amsterdam Channel District, the ‘Geelvinck Hinlopen Huis’, and the restoration of the major mural ‘Le Rêve de la Paix’ at the Library of the Palais des Nations in Geneva for the United Nations.

Since the early nineties, I was the driving force behind Museum Geelvinck. For this museum, with my wife Dunya – a cultural anthropologist and a feminist – we developed about one major exhibition a year on very diverse themes. These included: historic gardens, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, traces of the Dutch colonies, etchings by Rembrandt, export porcelain province plates etc. Many of these exhibitions encompassed loans from museums all over Europe.

Heritage interpretation – how to present the stories – is key to developing impactful exhibitions. During the last ten years, the focus of our museum has gradually shifted to historic pianos from the 18th and 19th centuries..

Today, I am in the process of developing a network-museum for this working collection of some 450 historic pianos and other keyboard instruments. This effort also includes organising series of chamber concerts, as well as – by now worldwide the largest – annual festival of fortepianos used for competition, symposium etc.. Again, this is not just about the living heritage of music but, instead, the emphasis is on giving historical context around the concert programs which the museum presents.

In the past thirty years, I have been a member of ICOM (DemHist, CIMCIM and ICLCM), ICOMOS (including ICOMOS-IFLA ISCCL and ISC Water), Slow Food, REMA–European Early Music Network, and Europa Nostra and, in the last ten years, I have been active internationally within these organisations. I am happy to share my experience and to serve as a linking-pin in support of Interpret Europe.