Cristina Ortega

Cristina Ortega Nuere is Chief Scientific and Operating Officer of World Leisure Organization since January 2016. She combines her principal professional activity with teaching at master level at the Universitat Oberta of Catalunya. Doctor in Leisure and Human Development, with a Master degree in Leisure Management, she graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy from the University of Deusto, Spain, and completed her studies in London, Middlesex and at Westminster University. She has combined her academic activity as researcher and professor for over two decades at the University of Deusto -over 50 research projects, dozens of publications and editor-in-chief of several scientific journals- with other institutional responsibilities. She was for 4 years the President of ENCATC, the leading European Network of Cultural Management and Policy, and the Chair of ENCATC’s Policy Group Monitors of Culture, made up of over 40 cultural observatories worldwide. She is a specialist in the evaluation of cultural projects and became a Jury Member of the European Capitals of Culture. In the Basque Country, she has been a member of the Basque Council of Culture and an Expert Evaluator of the Basque Cultural Observatory for 10 years. She usually participates as a speaker in international scientific conferences worldwide and she is the author of the reference book Observatorios Culturales. Creación de Mapas de lnfraestructuras y Eventos (Barcelona: Ariel, 2010), where she developed a cultural infrastructures and events utility model that has been applied in different cities and countries. Her area of specialization is leisure and culture, policies and evaluation.