Dr. Ana Serrano is specialized in the combination of conservation, art history and science for the interdisciplinary research of heritage textiles as sources of historical narratives.

After her bachelor-master programme in Conservation and Restoration from the NOVA University of Lisbon in 2010, she obtained her PhD in History in 2016 through the NOVA University and the Dutch Cultural Heritage Laboratory (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed - RCE).  Her PhD dissertation focused on the interdisciplinary combination of History and Chemistry for the investigation of the global trade and traditional European/Asian dye applications of red insect dyes, through extensive historical research supplemented by the chemical characterization of dyes in historical textiles in European museum collections.

Between 2016 and 2019 she worked in several post-doctoral projects at the University of Amsterdam and the RCE, related to the  investigation of the materials present in a large group of maritime archaeological textiles and their long-term preservation (WETDRESS: Back to the Objects project), and to the exploration of imaging techiques for better visualizations of the construction and condition assesment of textile surfaces (CarpetACT project). Between 2019 and 2020 she earned a Migelien Gerritzen Fellowship through the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, dedicating to the art historical and scientific investigation of the style, technological construction, and materials in extant silks in the museum's collection, while chemically assessing the red dye colourants present in the studied textiles, as a continuation to the narrative explored during her PhD thesis. 

Serrano joined in 2022 as textile conservation lecturer the Group of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (C&R), School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), University of Amsterdam. Since September 2023 she has become Assistant Professor and course coordinator for the C&R textile specialization.