Erminia Sciacchitano

Background

About Erminia Sciacchitano

I am a committed advocate for culture and cultural heritage as drivers and enablers of regenerative development, catalyzing collective intelligence to generate benefits for people, society and the planet. I am a conservation architect, with more than 20 years of experience in cultural policy-making, research and teaching, at the national, international and EU levels. My professional career crossed a variety of experiences and brilliant minds, deepening my expertise in the care and promotion of cultural heritage while exploring innovative paths generated by its interaction with contemporary creativity and the arts, the green and digital transition, the creative economy, peacebuilding and diplomacy. I have always nurtured culture policy-making with lessons from the ground and evidence from research and adopted participatory approaches in all my endeavours. As a strategic thinker, I frequently forecast future trends. One of them is the recognition of the role of communities in the sustainable management of cultural resources. This led me to curate the dossier for the Italian signature of the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the value of cultural heritage for society (Faro 2005). I feel privileged to have contributed to the European Union's effort to update the policy framework on cultural heritage, promoting more participatory, sustainable, holistic, cross-sectoral and integrated approaches, using the opportunity offered by the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, as Chief Scientific Advisor, to turn principles into practice. I continue to bring my expertise trough the Expert Group on Cultural Heritage, the WG of Member States Experts on Greening the Cultural and Creative Sectors (co-chair) and as National Contact Point of the New European Bauhaus. It has been a life-changing experience to draft the concept for the first G20 Culture Ministerial (Rome 2021) and the G7 Culture Ministerial (Naples 2024) and negotiate those historic Final Declarations, as well as to contribute to the Culture track under Indonesia, India and the current Brazil Presidency. Finally, I am contributing to scale up culture-based climate action at as a member of the Steering Committee of the Climate Heritage Network and the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action at the