Arthur Tompkins is a District Court Judge based in Wellington. He teaches 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 in Amelia, Umbria, Italy. He has lectured around New Zealand and abroad on art crime, and is an art-crime commentator on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show on RNZ National. He edited Art Crime and Its Prevention (London, 2016), and his Plundering Beauty: A history of Art Crime during War was published in London by Lund Humphries in March 2018.
Penelope Jackson is an art historian and curator with a special interest in New Zealand art crime. The former Director of Tauranga Art Gallery, she curated the exhibitions, including the award-winning Corrugations: The Art of Jeff Thomson. She has curated three exhibitions of Lynley Dodd’s work that have toured both New Zealand and Australia. 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 has 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. Her latest book, Females in the Frame: Women, Art, and Crime (Palgrave Macmillan) was launched at the 2019 symposium.
Louisa Joblins is a Senior Associate at Duncan Cotterill, specialising in 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. She has researched and written about Art Crime and Arts Law including in relation to the protection of Maori 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. She speaks regularly on art crime topics, 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).