Anne Luther
Dr. Anne Luther is a strategic advisor, technology expert, and catalyst with a focus on digital heritage. Her work applies technology, design, and humanities research for the interaction, exploration, and opening of cultural heritage preserved and represented in digital data. She is the founder of The Institute for Digital Heritage and Principal Investigator for Digital Benin, leading the development of a digital platform that brings together rich documentation from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin.
Over the past 15 years Anne worked with museums and cultural institutions internationally on digital projects, including digital exhibitions, online platforms, data sprints, data-driven research, and data visualizations. She has an established roster of designers and developers that she brings to every project creating user interfaces and interactions, backend solutions, and software development (AI, XR, data viz and analysis, etc.). Additionally she is consulting in grant proposal writing, hiring, skill and budget management, digitization, digital infrastructure, holistic and agile project management, digital restitution, and data licensing. She is establishing legal and ethical frameworks for digital access of sensitive content and cultural assets in archives and museums with experts in intellectual property and private law, cultural commons, and visual culture. The Institute for Digital Heritage collaborates with experts in digital heritage in communities around the world, with a focus on indigenous data sovereignty, authorship, and contextualization. Anne has an established network internationally and in Philadelphia of skilled individuals in the creative industry, in audio and video editing, photography and film, renderings, and more digital assets for online and in-space digital productions.
Anne holds a PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, where she developed a pioneering interactive data visualization software for qualitative research. Between 2013 and 2015 she brought a research focus in data-driven humanities research to the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping, and between 2015 and 2018 she established an emphasis on the analysis of museum data, leading data sprints, workshops, international research collaborations, and software development as research coordinator at the Center for Data Arts at Parsons School of Design in New York. She taught Art Theory as a TA for Professor Boris Groys at NYU between 2014 and 2017, and worked in several arts institutions internationally, including MoMA PS1, the House of World Cultures, Front Desk Apparatus, and for Antonia Josten Art World Recruitment. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in 2021-22 at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at UPenn.
As a project leader for Digital Benin, her work has been featured in the Financial Times, MIT Technology Review, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Art News, and The Art Newspaper, amongst other local and international news outlets.