Short biography

Sanneke Stigter is Assistant Professor in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the University of Amsterdam. In 2007 she set up the specialisation in Contemporary Art and has directed it ever since. She obtained a master's degree in Art History from the University of Amsterdam in 1996 and graduated cum laude in 2003 from the five-year postgraduate training programme in the Conservation of Paintings and Painted Objects, specialisation Modern Art, at the SRAL. She went on to work at the paintings conservation departments of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Frans Hals Museum De Hallen and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, before becoming Head Conservator for Contemporary Art and Modern Sculpture at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 2004. She worked there for nearly eight years, also curating several exhibitions on conservation. In 2016 she was awarded her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, Between Concept and Material. Working with Conceptual Art: A Conservator's Testimony, combining museum experience and theoretical insight. During her career, she has been project partner of many international research projects devoted to the conservation of contemporary art, both for the museum (Artist Interviews, Inside Installations and PRACTICs) and the university (New Strategies, NeCCAR, and NACCA). She has been principal investigator of several NWO research projects, DIAL for Complex Artworks: Digital Index of an Artwork’s Life and Interviews in Conservation Research, has been granted a Comenius Teaching Fellowship for initiating the Media Art Conservation Module and an IIS Sustainability Grant for Placemaking for Conservation. She currently holds and Art&Science residency in STUDIOTOPIA, and is researcher and advisor for the SBMK Project Photography and the RCE project Collection Interviews as part of the programme 20th Century Heritage. She combines this with being principal investigator of the NICAS research project Artwork Biographies and Institutional Memory, the DCC SURF project Collaborative Oral History Research Environment (CORE), and the three year PDI-SSH research project Oral Hisotry – Stories around Artworks at the Museum (OH-SMArt). In addition, Stigter has been on the board of several artist estates, does editorial work, amongst others for kM, and is part of the SBMK and INCCA steering committees. She was Assistant Coordinator of ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group, Chair of the Board of the ICOM-CC Fund and is founding member and Chair of the Alumni Network Conservation and Restoration in the Netherlands. Her research interests lie in conservation theory, museum practice, oral history and artist participation, with a special focus on conceptual art, photoworks and installation art. She has lectured and published widely on these topics.