Arthur Tompkins is a District Court Judge based in Hamilton. For a decade, prior to Covid, he taught the Art in War component course as part of the annual Graduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Heritage Protection Studies, presented by the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) in Amelia, Umbria, Italy. He has lectured around New Zealand and abroad on art crime, and was previously an art-crime commentator on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show on RNZ National. He is the author of Plundering Beauty: A History of Art Crime during War (Lund Humphries, London, 2018) and the editor of both Art Crime and Its Prevention (Lund Humphries, London, 2016), and Provenance Research Today (Lund Humphries, London, 2020).
Penelope Jackson MNZM is an Adjunct Research Associate of Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, with a special interest in crime and copying. The former Director of Tauranga Art Gallery, she curated the exhibitions, including the award-winning Corrugations: The Art of Jeff Thomson. More recent exhibitions include An Empty Frame: Crimes of Art in New Zealand (Waikato Museum) and Katherine Mansfield: A Portrait (NZ Portrait Gallery). Jackson has given several presentations about art crime, including at the 2014 and the 2015 Association for Research into Crimes against Art conferences in Amelia, Umbria, Italy. Jackson contributed to Art Crime and Its Prevention (2016), the Journal of Art Crime, and her book Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters: The New Zealand Story (Awa Press) was launched at the 2016 Art Crime Symposium. In 2019, Females in the Frame: Women, Art, and Crime (Palgrave Macmillan) was published followed three years later by, The Art of Copying Art (Palgrave Macmillan). The Art of Copying Art was awarded the Book of the Year (2023) by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. In 2023 Jackson was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art crime research and the visual arts. Her PhD topic was Writing and Righting: Crime and Copying in Art History. Jackson also writes short fiction. Her anthology of 25 short stories, One Degree Off: Stories of Singapore (Marshall Cavendish), was published in late 2023.
Louisa Joblin is a Special Counsel at MoranLaw, a boutique law firm in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, where she specialises in Not-For-Profit and Privacy Law. Louisa studied Art History and Italian at Victoria University of Wellington, along with her Law studies, and has a special interest in Arts Law. During her studies, Louisa was an intern in the Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, the specialist team dedicated to repatriating Māori and Moriori human remains. Louisa has researched and written about Art Crime and Arts Law including about the protection of Māori cultural heritage, repatriation of taonga and human remains, provenance, and artist resale royalties. Louisa contributed a chapter on arts law to Art Crime and Its Prevention (2016).
Ngarino Ellis (Ngapuhi, Ngati Porou) is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. She teaches a stage 2/3 paper entitled ‘Art Crime’ which includes illicit antiquities, looting, theft, vandalism, forgery, and art squads, both historic and contemporary across the globe, and supervises Honours dissertations and Masters theses on the field. She speaks regularly on art crime topics, especially about Māori, and contributed a chapter to Art Crime and Its Prevention (2016), and an article on looting in Aotearoa NZ for the Journal of Art Crime (2019).
The New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust 