Andrea Wallace

Andrea works across multiple disciplines and specialties including intellectual property law, art and cultural heritage law, digital humanities and technologies, critical theory, visual studies, and museum studies. She is Co-Director of the GLAM-E LabLink opens in a new window in partnership with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at New York University Law School.

Andrea's interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of art and cultural heritage with the digital realm and digital heritage management. Her work considers the impact of technologies on the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of cultural heritage and the obstacles and opportunities presented by digitisation. She frequently writes and presents on open culture and the impact that a claim to copyright in reproductions has on meaningful access to and reuse of cultural heritage in the public domain.

Some of Andrea's previous projects include Display At Your Own Risk, a research-led exhibition experiment featuring digital surrogates of public domain works published by cultural institutions around the world. This work established a theoretical framework for "surrogate intellectual property rights" in the cultural sector to examine the impact on the public's ability to access and reuse works in the public domain. Her work on digital and intellectual property restitution has been foundational to a growing field of practice and study on this topic. More recently, her work has shed light on aspects of data, digitisation, heritage and rights management that both reflect historical inequities and continue to create new ones, particularly with the emergence of machine learning and AI technologies.

With Douglas McCarthy (Open Future), she manages the Open GLAM Survey, which collects global data on open access policies and practices by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) and other cultural organisations.

Andrea's work has been written about by Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine and cited by the UK House of Lords, European Commission, WIPO and UNESCO.