Our Instructors

Dr Noah Charney is a best-selling author, columnist, TV presenter and professor of art history specializing in art crime.  He is also the founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the author of hundreds of academic and popular articles.  As a journalist he contributes regularly to The Guardian, the Daily Beast, Atlantic, Salon, The Art Newspaper, The Washington Post, and Esquire. His first novel, The Art Thief (Atria 2007), was translated into seventeen languages and was a best-seller in five countries.  A complete list of the books he has published can be viewed here. 

Dr. Marc Balcells is a Spanish criminologist, a professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and an associate professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Marc holds degrees in Law (Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Barcelona), Criminology (Universitat Autònoma; Barcelona), and Human Sciences (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), and masters both in Criminal Law (Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat de Barcelona) and Criminal Justice (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York). A Fulbright scholar, he obtained his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, at John Jay College. His research revolves around cultural heritage crime and, more specifically, the criminological aspects of archaeological looters. He frequently appears in Spanish media outlets to raise awareness about cultural heritage crime. Other research interests of Marc are victimology and cybercrime.

Dr Samer Abdel Ghafour is a Syrian cultural heritage specialist and the founder of ArchaeologyIN – the Archaeology Information Network.  He began his formal career at the National Archaeological Museum of Aleppo, where, from 1994 to 2005, he served as assistant curator for the Ancient Near East department before moving to Damascus to serve as Chief of Staff until 2012 at the office of the Director General for the Syrian Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums – DGAM. In 2018 he was awarded a PhD from La Sapienza Università di Roma with a thesis entitled “Ideologies of the Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Ancient and Modern Near East”.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in 2011, the focus of his research and academic teaching has been on safeguarding cultural heritage and countering the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities in conflict and post-conflict zones.

Dick Drent, the CEO of the International Security Expert Group (ISEG), has been a professor with ARCA for more than a decade, teaching about the proactive ways of protecting cultural heritage. With 30 years of law enforcement experience in the Netherlands and abroad, he’s spent his law enforcement career fighting organised crime and terrorism, mostly within the Undercover and Sensitive Operation Unit.

In 2005 Drent left policing to take on the role of security director at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Over the next ten years he worked to change the traditional methods of reactive museum security into a more dynamic proactive security which focused on preventing incidents before they happen.  He was also pinpointed chief investigator for the tracing and recovery of two priceless Van Gogh paintings stolen from the museum in an after-hours burglary in 2002.   

Drent left his position at the Van Gogh Museum in 2015 to start his private consultancy but stayed seconded as chief investigator for the retrieval of the Museum’s stolen paintings. In 2016, working as part of a joint recovery operation with the Guardia di Finanza of Italy the law enforcement action recovered both of the stolen Van Gogh’s, after they were identified with one of the leaders of a Camorra affiliated drug trafficking clan operating in Naples, the Netherlands and Spain.

Lynda Albertson is the CEO of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art.  Her courses focus on research methodology useful in understanding art-related crimes, to better preserve the world’s collective cultural heritage. 

In her capacity as a forensic analyst she assists, where possible, public officials in uncovering useful details surrounding crimes against art and antiquities as part of ARCA’s Transnational Crime Mapping Project which assists law enforcement and public prosecutors in Europe and North America.  She also oversees onsite operations during ARCA’s Postgraduate Certificate Programming on art crime and cultural heritage protection.

Judge Arthur Tompkins is a District Court Judge in New Zealand, and a permanent member of the Supreme Court of Pitcairn Island. He gained his Bachelor’s degree with Honours in Law from Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1983, and graduated Masters in Law, with First Class Honours, from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, England, in 1984.

Since 2010 he has taught Art Crime in War as part of the Postgraduate Certificate Program in International Art Crime and Heritage Protection course, presented annually by the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. He has presented papers to three of ARCA’s previous International Art Crime Conferences in Italy and has delivered public lectures on art crime during war, and the fate of libraries during war, in New Zealand and elsewhere.

He is the author of Plundering Beauty: A history of art crime during war (Lund Humphries, London; 2018) and the editor of Art Crime and Its Prevention (Lund Humphries, London 2016) and Provenance Research Today: Principles, Practice, Problems (Lund Humphries, London, 2020)