Symposium program
9th November 2026

Who are the CREA speakers?

Eva Coudyzer holds a Master’s degree in Art History and Archaeology from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Master’s degree in Digital Humanities from KU Leuven. She is Head of the Digital Photographic Collection of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), where she contributes to the development of the collections management system and to promoting the photographic collection made available through BALaT.

She also coordinates and partners in national and international research projects, including the METABELGICA project, which aims to develop a linked data platform for Belgian entities, shared by Belgium’s Federal Scientific Institutions (FSIs). She is also the promotor of the BALaTAI research project, in collaboration with Ghent University (TELIN), which focuses on the application of AI technologies to cultural heritage datasets.

Bart Fransen is Head of the Centre for the Study of the Flemish Primitives at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels. He gained his degree as Doctor in History of Art from Leuven University in 2009 with a PhD on 'Rogier van der Weyden and Stone Sculpture in Brussels' (Harvey Miller, 2013). He worked at the Prado Museum, Madrid, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and Leuven University. He publishes and lectures on Early Netherlandish art and on the artistic relations between the Burgundian Netherlands and Spain. He was director of the VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access), that received the 2019 European Heritage Award /Europa Nostra Award. Currently he is leading research projects on the Saint-John’s Hospital in Bruges, on the painter Justus of Ghent and on the Granada Triptych by Dieric Bouts.

Sergio Servellón studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the University of Antwerp. He previously served as Program Coordinator for Conservation and Restoration at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (now part of the University of Antwerp). Since 2005, he has been Director of the FeliX Art & Eco Museum, which he transformed from a monographic institution into a thematic museum exploring the intersections of modernism, ecology, and community engagement.

Active in international museum governance, he is a former President of the regional and national section of ICOM Belgium and a member of the Executive Board of the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO), where he initiated the Working Group on Sustainability and Climate Action. He also co-chairs the ICOM-Documentation Working Group on Intangible Heritage.

He served as web editor for the Abstract Modernism section of the Flemish Art Collection and co-initiated BeAM (Belgian Abstract Modernism in the Spotlight), a research project funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO). As a PhD researcher in Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven, his research focuses on the historiography of the Belgian avant-garde, particularly Constructivism or Zuivere Beelding, and its institutional reception.

Simon Leenknegt is researcher at Kunstenpunt/Flanders Arts Institute, the expertise centre for visual arts, performing arts & classical music in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium. Holding an MA in Art History and in Teaching (Ghent University), he has worked in the arts, cultural heritage, academia, and education. Simon is expert author on Belgium for the Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends.

Joke Beyl works as a researcher for FARO, the Flemish Institution for Cultural Heritage. She has worked at the University of Bergen (Norway) and at the Musée Fabre (Montpellier, France), and conducted research into the relationship between culture and digital media at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She holds a PhD in Media and Communication Studies (VUB).

Aline Verstraten is a visual artist specialised in oil painting, doctor in the visual and audiovisual arts and television maker at Denderland TV. She has long been fascinated by the dynamic relationship between the attraction and withdrawal of images. From 2022 to 2026, she explored this subject further in her doctoral research at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts, titled “The Withdrawing Image. An Artistic Research into the Active Resistance of Painting as a Medium.” Her practice is a combination of painting, image thinking, reading and writing. https://www.aline-verstraten.be/ 

Patrick Ceyssens is an independent visual artist, coordinator of the Visual Visionaries research group, and lecturer in visual thinking at PXL-MAD School of Arts and UHasselt. For Ceyssens, images are therefore not merely carriers of meaning, but processes of thought in their own right. His focus on visual instability aligns with an approach to translation that emphasizes disruption rather than seamless transfer. At the same time, the language we use to speak about knowledge and understanding is deeply intertwined with visual metaphors. And what remains unseen often proves to be just as meaningful as what reveals itself. His techniques therefore function as artistic instruments that respond to the complex workings of imagination, perception, and memory. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including in public commissions, and is held in various collections. A comprehensive CV can be found at www.patrickceyssens.com.

Hanna Brinkmann is a Senior Researcher at the Department for Arts and Cultural Studies at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. She received her Dr. phil. in Art History from the University of Vienna. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on art experience, empirical aesthetics, and encounters with cultural objects in museums and post digital environments. Currently she is Principal Investigator of the FWF-funded project “Art Experience in the (post-) digital Age” (OrDiV). Her broader interests include visual culture, digital humanism, museum participation, and the potential of museums to foster resonance, reflection, and well-being. 

Christopher Linden is a Post Doctoral researcher in Psychology at KU Leuven. His research examines how museum visitors navigate exhibition spaces and engage with the materiality of contemporary art, as well as the ways in which contextualising information influences aesthetic appreciation and art engagement. Using multi-modal studies, combining mobile eye-tracking with questionnaire responses, he investigates aesthetic evaluations in naturalistic settings. Christopher holds a PhD in psychology from KU Leuven, which he obtained with a doctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). 

Stefanie De Winter is Assistant Professor in Conservation and Museum Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, and an affiliated researcher at KU Leuven. Trained as a painting conservator before moving into art history, she works at the intersection of conservation, art history and empirical aesthetics. Her doctoral research examined fluorescent colours in the work of Frank Stella, translating art-historical questions into empirical perception research. As an FWO postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven, she developed appearance-based approaches to the conservation of modern art and a method for restoring the appearance of aged Color Field paintings using augmented reality (AR). At Maastricht, she is developing a research line on image integrity, with a focus on new strategies for conserving artworks in digital form. She is Associate Editor of Art & Perception and a member of De Jonge Academie.

Adriaan Gonnissen is Curator of Modern Art at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA). As a historian and art historian, his professional passion lies in developing research-driven exhibitions and publications. His field of expertise is Belgian modernism, approached from both an international and a regional perspective. He has curated exhibitions including Cinema Joostens (2014), Flouquet, Kassák, Léonard: De architectuur van het beeld tijdens het interbellum (2018), Trans-Atlantische modernismen. België-Argentinië 1910–1958 (2022), Jules Schmalzigaug. Futurismo! (2024), Jef Verheyen. Venster op het oneindige (2024), Baanbrekers van het abstracte. De Stijl vs. Kring Moderne Kunst (2025), Donas, Archipenko & La Section d'Or. Betoverend modernisme (2025) en Zingend rood. Ensor, Wouters, Schmalzigaug (2026). In addition to editing books on modern art and artists, he has also contributed essays on, among others, René Magritte, Frans Masereel, and James Ensor.

Demo facilitators

Julian Salhofer is a PhD student at TU Wien and a researcher at the University for Continuing Education Krems and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten. His research lies at the intersection of computer graphics, virtual reality, and cultural heritage, combining technical development with artistic and empirical approaches.

Panel moderators

Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project and Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. An experimental psychologist specializing in museum experiences, Sasha explores how the design of art encounters can deepen engagement, foster social connection, and support wellbeing. She works collaboratively with museums including The Met, the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and ICA Philadelphia, conducting research on slow looking, social interaction, and visitor experience. Sasha earned her PhD in Psychology from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she partnered with Manchester Art Gallery to study and evaluate its visitor-centered approaches to art engagement. She is also co-founder of CREA (Crossroads of Research and Experience of Art), an international initiative bringing academic researchers and museum professionals together to co-create research and translate evidence about museum experiences into museum practice.

Nicole Ruta is currently a Senior Researcher at the Arts and Minds Lab (TU Berlin), where focuses on interdisciplinary initiatives at the intersection of psychology and art, and she holds a PhD (Cardiff Metropolitan University) on visual perception in far peripheral visual space and its artistic representations. She is passionate about creating physical and virtual spaces that facilitate multidisciplinary dialogue around core issues relevant to the arts. Her research has been driven by questions that originate from artistic practice and art history, which she investigates through vision science, psychology of emotions and embodied cognition. In 2024, she received the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Award for Outstanding Contributions of Young Scientists. She is also a co-funder of CREA and for the inaugural 2024 edition she created freely accessible visual notes to disseminate the workshop's insights with a broad audience, aiming to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world art practices.