Erna Yolanda Sellhorn Nett
Legal Counsel, Oswaldo Vigas Foundation
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Erna Yolanda is an attorney, with over ten years of experience in art law, focused on provenance property, art trade, exhibition and consignments, licit exportation, copyrights, authentications, certifications and mechanism to fight against counterfeited works of art, she also is an attorney focused on art crime like restitutions and repatriations and cultural heritage protection, include indigenous people. She is the Legal Counsel of the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, a non-profit Institution founded to protect and promote and research the artistic work of plastic artist Oswaldo Vigas. Throughout her career she was responsible to directs the design of any necessary legal tools to protect the art work of the artist, its copyrights and also implement mechanism for authentications.
She is the author of “Culture e Droit International au Vénézuela”, “International illicit trade of cultural property” and “The illicit traffic of cultural property and Venezuela´s legal system”. Also, She was professor in Cultural Law at the Universidad Monteávila, Caracas, Venezuela (2008-2009) and, porfessor for Private and Comparative International Law at the Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, Venezuela (2010-2011).
Erna Yolanda’s law practice has included litigation since 1998, in a wide range of law, including art and commercial disputes at both the domestic and international level. Since 2007, she is responsible of the Legal Department in Oswaldo Vigas Foundation acting as legal counsel. In 2019, She shared panel with Mehar Cohan, in the ARCA 2019 Art Crime Conference in Amèlia, Italy, with the topic: Unpacking the Hildebrand Gurlitt Art Collection: A Training Exercise in Understanding the Limitation of Policing in Art Crime Investigation. She was appointed to the original Arbitration pool of CAfA in January 2020.
Erna Yolanda’s educational background includes: graduated from Law School from Universidad Central de Venezuela (1998); she obtained a Magister Scientiarum degree in Private and Comparative International Law from Universidad Central de Venezuela (2008), receiving honours and publication mention on her undergraduate thesis entitled “International Illicit Trade of Cultural Property”, mentioned above; she obtained a postgraduate certification in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection form the Association for research into Crime against Art (2019).
Jurisdiction: Venezuela