We are passionate about all aspects of art crime, and write and speak about this field, especially as it occurs in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2026, our fourth inaugural trustee, Louisa Joblin, stood down – we thank her for all her wonderful contributions over the years.
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).
Dr Penelope Jackson MNZM is an Adjunct Research Associate of Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, with a special interest in art crime and copying. She is a former Director and Curator of Tauranga Art Gallery. Jackson contributed to Art Crime and Its Prevention (2016), the Journal of Art Crime, and her books include: Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters: The New Zealand Story (2016, Awa Press), Females in the Frame: Women, Art, and Crime (2019, Palgrave Macmillan), The Art of Copying Art (2022, Palgrave Macmillan). The Art of Copying Art was awarded the 2023 Book of the Year 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. In 2024 she was a Sir William Dobell Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra, and in 2025, her latest book, UNSEEN: Art and Crime in Australia (Monash University Publishing) was published.
Dr Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngati Porou) is a 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. Her publications on art crime focus on taonga fakes in museum collections (in Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, pp. 347-349, 2024/5), vandalism of Māori art (Journal of Art Crime 25: 3-12, 2021), and looting and theft in colonial New Zealand (in Arthur Tompkins, ed., Art Crime and Its Prevention, pp. 148-160, 2016).
The New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust 