Iris Șerban is an anthropologist, curator, and cultural manager. With over 10 years of experience in the museum sector, she currently works at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, where she coordinates the Image Archive. She believes in action-oriented research, advocates for making archives more accessible, and develops projects that explore new forms of cultural expression for both tangible and intangible heritage.

In 2021, she joined the team of the Museum of Abandonment, Romania’s first digital and participatory museum-forum dedicated to researching the history of abandonment. She takes care of the museum’s collections and coordinates the teams responsible for archiving, digitizing, and documenting nearly 20,000 photographs, testimonies, documents, and objects that tell the hidden history of child institutionalization in socialist and post-socialist Romania.

Iris is the co-author of several volumes on archives and urban memory. She occasionally writes autoethnographic short stories. She’s been thinking about writing poetry—but hasn’t quite found the courage yet.