Mariana Ziku has a background in Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities, specialising in the Digital Management of Cultural Heritage, with a long-standing research focus on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

She holds a Master of Science (MSc, Hons) in Digital Humanities from the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven, a Master of Arts (MA, Hons) in Curation and History of Art, and a Bachelor in Art Sciences from the School of Fine Arts, University of Ioannina. She also holds a Certificate of Specialised Training in Cultural Management from the Centre of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

She is currently a PhD candidate and member of the Intelligent Interaction Research Group at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, School of Social Sciences, University of the Aegean, and a member of the university spinoff Intelligent Systems and Experiences, active in the area of Human Computer Interaction with applications in the Digital Cultural Heritage Management domain. She is a staff member of the Master’s Programme Folk/Popular Culture and Modern Cultural Heritage at the Hellenic Open University, and a long-term research collaborator at Web2Learn, where she applies data analytics, information visualisation, and computational methods bridging humanities with other disciplines. She is the co-founder of the Biennale of Western Balkans, promoting intangible cultural heritage and cross-border cooperation in the Balkans.

She has worked on over 15 European and national projects in research and culture, specialising in digital heritage infrastructures, semantic web technologies, and crowdsourcing, with a strong commitment to participatory design and open science. She has been trained in the digital curation of intangible, audiovisual and documentary heritage in Egypt, Belgium, and Germany as a grant recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci European Commission programme.