Our expert

Mária Tajtáková

Mária Tajtáková (Assoc. Prof., Ing., PhD.) is a leading Slovak expert in arts marketing and audience development. Her expertize encompasses also the field of cultural tourism, culture-led urban and regional development, and cultural sustainability. She graduated from the University of Economics in Bratislava and the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica (Slovakia). She did her PhD. in arts marketing (2005) and she was promoted to associate professor based on her works on audience development strategies in the performing arts (2009). Currently she works in the field of culture as a researcher, instructor, manager and active performer. She is associate professor at the School of Management/City University of Seattle in Slovakia. Besides, she is manager of non-for-profit organisation ARS IUVENTUTIS dealing with research studies within culture and the career development of young artists. Since 2015, she has been member of the European Expert Network on Culture and Audiovisual (EENCA), in the framework of which she was involved in studies on funding mechanism in the music industry, sustainable cultural tourism, European Youth Orchestra assessment, and institutional tools available to cultural heritage sites for achieving sustainable tourism. She is also experienced with European projects, namely as project manager of the EU project KULT-TOUR CENTRE (Interreg IIIA) intended to enhance cross-border cultural tourism between Slovakia and Austria, and as evaluator (member of the international evaluation team) within the ex-post evaluation of the EU project European Capital of Culture – Košice 2013. Prior to her current position she worked as marketing manager of Opera and Ballet of the Slovak National Theatre, consultant of the Slovak Ministry of Culture and senior researcher at the National Centre for European and Global Studies of the Slovak republic. She was also an associate of the International Centre for Culture & Management in Salzburg, Austria. Within her professional practice she lead numerous market research projects and studies that served as a basis for designing concrete actions in several cultural institutions in Slovakia.

Meet our experts

Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar

Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar holds a PhD in economics. She has published more than 40 journal papers to date, most of them in top tier tourism scientific journals. Knezevic has been invited to present her work at approximately 30 universities internationally. Her work won several national and international awards, most notably the international Sinclair Award for the best paper published in Tourism Economics in 2016, 2019. She was engaged as an expert in more than 50 consulting and research projects in the field of tourism, leisure and hospitality.

Indrek Ibrus

Indrek Ibrus is a professor of media innovation at Tallinn University’s (TLU) Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School (BFM). He is also the head of TLU’s Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT). Currently his main research area are the innovative reuses of digitised cultural heritage contents, but he also leads research projects on cross-innovation, cross- and transmediality, media and cultural policies. He is the co-editor of “Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions” (together with Carlos A. Scolari; Peter Lang, 2012) Dr. Ibrus received his PhD from London School of Economics and Political Science.

Recent publications: Ibrus, Indrek; Rohn, Ulrike; Nanì, Alessandro (2018). Searching for public value in innovation coordination: How Eurovision Song Contest served to innovate the public service media model in Estonia. International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Rohn, Ulrike; Ibrus, Indrek (2018). A Management Approach to Transmedia Enterprises. In: Freeman, Matthew; Gambarato, Renira (Ed.). The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies. London: Routledge.

Gillian Doyle

Gillian Doyle is Professor of Media Economics and Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research (CCPR) at the University of Glasgow where she directs Glasgow’s MSc in Media Management. Her research on media economics and policy and on the impact of digitisation has been translated and published in several languages. Gillian is Principal Investigator (PI) on ‘Television Production in Transition: Independence, Scale and Sustainability’, a major research project examining recent transformations in ownership structures in the television production sector funded by the UK Economic & Social Research Council (2017-2020). She was PI on a recently completed ESRC –funded project on ‘Multi-platform Media and the Digital Challenge’ which investigated economic and policy aspects of digital media convergence and on a major AHRC-funded project entitled ‘The UK Film Council: A Case Study of Film Policy in Transition’. She was also Lead Investigator on ‘Converging Technologies and Business Models’, a project that forms part of the work programme of CREATe, the RCUK hub for research on Copyright and New Business Models for the Creative Economy. Gillian has carried out and supervised studies on media economics and media policy for the Council of Europe, the European Commission and the OECD. Gillian is former President of the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI).