Born in 1960, Dr Ulrike Wendland studied art history and obtained her doctorate in Hamburg. She then pursued postgraduate studies in heritage conservation in Bamberg and followed a traineeship at the Monument Protection Office in Hamburg. Ms. Wendland then joined the Technical Universities in Berlin and Zurich as a university assistant, before being appointed state conservator in Saarland and in Saxony-Anhalt from 2005-2020. She became managing director of the German National Committee for Heritage Conservation (DNK) in Berlin in 2020 and is member of several advisory boards, boards of trustees and professional associations.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Drachenberg was born in 1962 in Berlin. He studied art history at Humboldt University Berlin from 1984 to 1989, completing both the state examination and a diploma with a thesis on the architectural history of St. Nicholas’ Church in Brandenburg an der Havel. In 1989, he began working as a regional consultant in practical monument preservation at the Institute for Monument Preservation of the GDR and later at the Brandenburg State Office for Monument Preservation, where he has served as head of department since 2003 and, since 2012, as state conservator and deputy director. In 1999 he earned his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on the architectural history of the city of Luckenwalde from 1918 to 1933.

Since 2021 he has been Deputy Chairman of the Association of Monument Preservation Authorities in the German States (VDL) and assumes the position of Chairman on June 1, 2026. He has held teaching appointments at BTU Cottbus (1999–2002), at the Free University of Berlin (2003–2019), and, since 2003, at the Technical University of Berlin in the master’s program in monument preservation, where he has served as an honorary professor since 2019.

He is the author of numerous publications on topics including the architectural history of modernism in the interwar period in Luckenwalde, Brandenburg an der Havel, and Burg Ziesar; monument preservation in churches; the revitalization of inner cities; the former KGB prison in Potsdam; questions of conservation and restoration ethics; the relevance of the Venice Charter; industrial heritage preservation in Germany; manor houses in the German-Polish border region; and German-Polish cooperation in heritage preservation.