Board
ICOM DOCUMENTATION is managed by a Board, the core members of which are elected by the full membership during the ICOM Triennial Conference. The current Board´s mandate lasts from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2028.
Chair Jonathan Ward 🇺🇸 United States chair.documentation@icom.museum
Senior Editor and Global Lead of the Getty Vocabulary Program at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. With over 20 years as a metadata specialist in the fields of arts and culture, Jonathan has lectured and presented across the world on both the Getty Vocabularies and broader aspects of museum documentation and standards. For the past six years, Jonathan has been the Vice-Chair of ICOM Documentation, and more recently, Interim Chair.
Vice-chair Adele Barbato 🇺🇸 United States adele.barbato[at]gmail.com
Adele has worked within museums and cultural heritage documentation for over 20 years, overseeing collection systems, data, and workflow implementations. She has led major system development and collections information projects for institutions across the US, including the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and the Harvard University Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She is currently the Collections System Manager at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, chair of ICOM Documentation’s Museum Documentation Definition Task Force, and has been an ICOM Documentation board member since 2023.
Treasurer Gordon McKenna 🇬🇧 United Kingdom gordon.mckenna.1957[at]hotmail.co.uk
Gordon has worked in the cultural heritage sector for over 30 years in a series of challenging and rewarding posts. His first degree was in Archaeological Sciences and later obtained a master’s in information technology. He joined the Collections Trust in 1991, where he was Collections Trust’s Standards Manager and authored standards and guides such as SPECTRUM Interactive, SPECTRUM Knowledge, Standards in Action – SPECTRUM IT Guide and Documentation: a practical guide. Gordon has been an active ICOM Documentation member and has held the Treasurer position since 2024.
Editor Edurne Uriarte Santillán 🇲🇽 Mexico uyulala.edu[at]gmail.com
Edurne is a sociologist, trained in the history and communication of science and Social Sciences and Humanities. From 2013, she has worked in the Collection Inventory and Communication Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (DGRU-UNAM), contributing to the documentation of UNAM’s cultural and scientific collections. She is a member of the CIDOC CRM Spanish Translation Initiative and on the board of ICOM Documentation as Editor since March 2024.
Regular board member Paula Casajús 🇦🇷 Argentina paula.casajus[at]gmail.com
Regular board member since 2023. She studied History of Art at Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is responsible for the documentation of collections at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Argentina where she has faced challenges in digitization and access to information. Paula collaborates with the DOMINO Working Group, the Museum Documentation Definition Task Force, and the CIDOC CRM Spanish Translation Initiative.
Regular board member Matthieu Bonicel 🇫🇷 France mbonicel[at]acg.paris
Library curator, École des chartes alumnus, and Doctor of Middle Ages History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (2014). Matthieu has been a curator at the French national library for 10 years, head of Publishing at Lafayette Anticipations (a contemporary art foundation in Paris), and freelance consultant for various museums and cultural institutions. He is currently Chief Museum Librarian at the Musée d’Orsay. ICOM France Liaison board member of the ICOM Documentation Board for the past year and a half, he worked to develop the French-speaking community.
Regular board member Frank von Hagel 🇩🇪 Germany f.v.hagel[at]smb.spk-berlin.de
A historian, political scientist, and museum enthusiast, Frank has worked in the field of museum documentation in various museums since 1995. Has been a member of ICOM Documentation since 2000 and is a founding member of the LIDO working group. In 2005, he moved to the Institute for Museum Research in Berlin as a scientist, where he is responsible for documentation, standardization, and standard files and supervises numerous national and international projects. He is spokesman for the Documentation Section of the German Museums Association and is involved in important initiatives such as the National Research Data Infrastructure, the German Digital Library and Europeana, as well as the further development of national and international vocabularies.
Regular board member Mohamed Ibrahim Madkour 🇪🇬 Egypt mohamed.ibrahim@dainst.de
Egyptian archaeologist, completing his MA on sustainability of archaeological sites in the Dakhla Oasis by developing GIS-based geospatial databases with climate data. He works in the archive collection at the German Archaeological Institute. Mohamed has been a member of several projects on Heritage Impact Assessments for Abu Simbel and the reconstruction of the Tomb of Hesy-Ra at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He was also curator at the Children’s Museum in Cairo and was heritage coordinator at Megwara Bulit Environment Collective. He was selected in 2025 to participate in the World Heritage Young Professional Forum and the 47th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Paris.
The Chairs of DOCUMENTATION Working Groups are ex officio observers on the Board.