Nuria Sanz Gallego, archaeologist and anthropologist, is an international civil servant at the United Nations. She holds a PhD in Prehistory from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and a PhD in Human Ecology from the University of Tübingen (Germany). She has developed her professional career as an expert in natural and cultural heritage management in multilateral institutions such as the Council of Europe, European Union, UNESCO and FAO since 1995. She is editor and author of specialized publications on public international law for the preservation of biological and cultural heritage, on traditional and indigenous knowledge and author and editor of more than 40 publications on World Heritage, especially on issues related to human evolution and cultural diversity. In 2009 she was appointed UNESCO's Global Coordinator for Rock Art Heritage. Throughout her professional career she has directed the Latin America and Caribbean Unit of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, from where she has coordinated the largest nomination project for the UNESCO List: Qhapaq Ñan, The Andean Road System, a process in which the largest network of anthropological knowledge in the Andes was established in the framework of the World Heritage Convention. She was appointed Director and Representative of UNESCO in Mexico in 2013, from where she directed among others the scientific programme on the Origin of Food Production and Sustainable Development. In Mexico she has implemented more than 30 projects on indigenous knowledge, on bio-cultural heritage of peasant communities, on crafts and on linguistic diversity.
She has coordinated the UNESCO thematic programme on Sciences and Human Evolution HEADS (Human Evolution: Dispersals, Adaptations and Social Developments) establishing a multidisciplinary network active to date of 250 world scientists in paleoanthropology, genetics, human ecology, archaeology, zoology, palynology, geomorphology and linguistics. She is the editor of 7 volumes of UNESCO on Human Evolution.
She has been appointed as chief curator of the UNESCO Art Collection, developed its action plan and published two catalogues of the collection and a monograph on African art.
Invited by FAO, she is currently developing the UNESCO-FAO Action Plan as Senior Advisor in the FAO Department of Biodiversity and Climate Change in Rome. She is now working on the evolutionary history of food since prehistoric times, the importance of traditional knowledge in the production and consumption of food and its contribution to the consequences of climate change.