Stuart E. Eizenstat
Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury · Former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union
He wrote the rules the art world still follows on looted art.
Stuart Eizenstat is the principal author of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, agreed by 44 countries in 1998, and of the Terezin Declaration of 2009. In 2024 he co-authored the Best Practices for their implementation. They remain the international standard by which museums, auction houses and governments return art taken by the Nazis to the families it was taken from. He still does the work himself: in September 2026 the Art Institute of Chicago returned Jean Metzinger’s Woman with a Fan (1913) to the heirs of the Jewish collector Emanuel Lewenstein, after negotiations he conducted as counsel for Mondex. The painting had been sold under duress in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in 1940.
He has served as Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues to five U.S. Secretaries of State, in Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Under President Clinton he negotiated eight billion dollars in compensation from Swiss and French banks, German and Austrian companies and European insurers. Since 2009 he has been the pro bono Special Negotiator for the Jewish Claims Conference, securing more than ten billion dollars for survivors.
Earlier in his career he was U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Under Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and chief domestic policy adviser to President Carter. He is senior counsel at Covington & Burling in Washington, and has come to Davos for the Forum week for thirty years.
Solange Farkas
Founder, Videobrasil · President of the International Jury, 61st Venice Biennale
For more than forty years, she has decided which artists from the Global South the world would see first.
Solange Farkas, founder and artistic director of Videobrasil, was named president of the international jury of the 61st Venice Biennale. She founded Videobrasil in São Paulo in 1983 and has directed every edition of its festival since. What began as a showcase for video grew into one of the most important platforms for contemporary art from the Global South, with a collection and a research archive that museums and curators around the world draw on.
From 2007 to 2010 she was director and chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. She co-curated the film programme of the 10th Sharjah Biennial and sat on its jury in 2023, and received the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award in 2017.
Igor Tulchinsky
Founder, Chairman and CEO, WorldQuant
The quantitative investor who brought the Bayeux Tapestry back to Britain for the first time in almost a thousand years.
Igor Tulchinsky is an investor, entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. He founded WorldQuant in 2007, and today it is one of the world’s largest quantitative investment firms, with more than 1,100 people in 28 offices. According to Bloomberg, it manages close to forty billion dollars in assets, together with WorldQuant Millennium Advisors, its joint venture with Millennium.
In 2026 he gave £5 million to bring the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum, one of the largest single-exhibition sponsorships in the museum’s history. Spear’s called him the billionaire hedge fund manager bringing the Tapestry to the British Museum. He sees arts and culture as an essential part of philanthropy, whatever the industry, and thinks about giving in terms of impact. He also founded WorldQuant University, which offers a master’s degree in financial engineering free of charge. His books include The Age of Prediction, Finding Alphas and The UnRules: Man, Machines and the Quest to Master Markets.
Claudia Romo Edelman
Founder, We Are All Human · Former Head of Public Relations and Media, World Economic Forum
She ran the World Economic Forum’s media for eight years. Now she comes to Davos with a movement of her own.
Claudia Romo Edelman is the founder of the We Are All Human Foundation and of Hispanic Star, which work to bring the Hispanic community in the United States to the centre of business, culture and public life. In 2019 she launched the Hispanic Promise at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a pledge to hire, promote and celebrate Latino talent that more than 300 companies have since signed, among them Microsoft, Unilever and SAP. Each January she now brings a delegation of Hispanic leaders to Davos.
A Mexican-Swiss diplomat, she headed public relations, media and special projects at the World Economic Forum in Geneva from 1999 to 2007, then led communications for UNHCR and for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, served as UNICEF’s global chief of public advocacy and headed communications in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General on the 2030 Agenda and climate. Along the way she helped launch (RED), which raises money for the fight against AIDS in Africa, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
She sits on the boards of the Friends of the American Latino Museum, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and has served on the board of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library. She is the author of the Hispanic Star series of bilingual children’s books with Macmillan. TIME named her one of its Latino Leaders of 2024, Bloomberg one of its Women Who Lead in 2026, and she holds the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
Michael Punke
Vice President, Global Public Policy, Amazon Web Services · Author of The Revenant
He wrote The Revenant in the margins of a career in trade policy. Then it became an Oscar-winning film.
Michael Punke is Vice President of Global Public Policy at Amazon Web Services, where since 2017 he has led the company’s work with governments around the world. Before that he served under President Obama as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative and U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, from 2010 to 2016. There he led the negotiations for the Trade Facilitation Agreement of 2013 and the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement in 2015. Earlier in his career he was director for international economic affairs at the White House, on both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.
He wrote The Revenant in the early mornings before his days as a trade lawyer. The novel became Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film with Leonardo DiCaprio, which won three Academy Awards, while its author, then a serving ambassador, was barred by ethics rules from promoting it. The book became a #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has since written a second novel, Ridgeline, and two books of narrative history, Last Stand and Fire and Brimstone.
Cristiana Collu
Director, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
The director who rehung Italy’s national gallery of modern art, now reinventing a Venetian palazzo that is a collection, a library and a home at once.
Cristiana Collu has directed the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice since 2024. Left to the city in 1869 by Count Giovanni Querini Stampalia, the last of his family, the foundation keeps its palazzo, library and collection open to the public. In May 2026 she opened The Dreamer, a new arrangement of the house inspired by the passions of the founder and his sister Caterina, in which more than 170 works, among them Giovanni Bellini’s Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, meet the work of six contemporary artists.
She became Italy’s youngest museum director at 27, when she took over MAN in Nuoro, and went on to lead MART in Rovereto and, from 2015 to 2024, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. There her rehang of the national collection, Time Is Out of Joint, freed it from chronology and doubled the number of visitors within a year. In 2019 she sat on the international jury of the 58th Venice Biennale.
Amir Husain
Founder, SparkCognition · Author of Generative Art
He wrote a book called Generative Art before most of the art world had decided whether to be afraid of the idea.
Amir Husain is a technologist, inventor and author, and holds 50 patents in artificial intelligence and distributed systems. He founded SparkCognition in 2013, with Michael Dell as its first investor, and built it into one of America’s industrial AI unicorns, today called Avathon. He co-founded SkyGrid, a joint venture with Boeing on autonomous aviation, and now chairs WorldQuant Foundry. He has advised NATO and the Council on Foreign Relations on artificial intelligence.
He also makes pictures with code. His book Generative Art teaches how to create images with algorithms, using software he wrote himself, and The Sentient Machine and The Cybernetic Society (2025) ask how humans and machines will live and work together. A computer he invented is in the collection of the Computer History Museum in California, and with his wife Zaib he gave $5 million to found the Machine Learning Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
Mathias Doutreleau
Founder and Chairman, Concours d’Elégance Suisse · Head of Historic Motor Sport, FIA
He decides, for a living, what still counts as authentic once a masterpiece of design has been restored.
Mathias Doutreleau is the founder and chairman of the Concours d’Elégance Suisse, the oldest concours in Switzerland, held at the Château de Coppet on Lake Geneva. Its jury of international historians and designers judges elegance and authenticity in equal measure.
He leads Historic Motor Sport at the FIA, the governing body of Formula One and world motor sport, and heads its Historic Motor Sport Commission, which is working towards 2030 on how historic cars are judged for their faithfulness to their period. He previously directed The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering in California, founded Project Automobile Consultants in 2009, and sits on the international jury of The I.C.E. St. Moritz, the International Concours of Elegance held each winter on the frozen lake of St. Moritz, where the rarest classic cars are driven and judged on natural ice.
Ori Goshen
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, AI21 Labs
One of the founders behind the AI that writes alongside millions of people.
Ori Goshen is co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs, one of Israel’s few AI unicorns. He founded it in Tel Aviv in 2017 with Professor Yoav Shoham of Stanford and Professor Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye. AI21 builds its own large language models for enterprises, among them Jamba, available through Amazon’s and Google’s clouds, and created Wordtune, one of the first AI writing assistants, used by millions.
AI21 is backed by Nvidia, Google and Intel, among others. Before AI21, Goshen co-founded Crowdx, a network analytics company later acquired by Cellwize, now part of Qualcomm, and led mobile development at Fring, the first app to bring internet calls to the iPhone.
Godfrey Mutizwa
Chief Editor, CNBC Africa
The editor who puts the questions to Africa’s business leaders, on air and on the stage in Davos.
Godfrey Mutizwa has covered African business for almost forty years, including a decade at Reuters and Bloomberg News. Since 2020 he has been Chief Editor of CNBC Africa, the continent’s largest business news channel, where he leads the coverage of the leaders, markets and policies shaping the continent’s economies, and presents Power Lunch.
He moderates debates for the World Bank, the African Development Bank and Afreximbank. At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in 2026 he led the sessions on Africa’s job engine and on the unstoppable march of renewables, which he opened with the story of solar power reaching his village in rural Zimbabwe.