Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna

Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna is Vice President for Global Privacy for the Washington DC-based Future of Privacy Forum, a global non-profit present in Brussels, Tel Aviv, Singapore, New Delhi and Nairobi, where she leads the work on global privacy and data protection developments as they relate to the digital economy and new technologies, including AI. She is also an associated researcher for the LSTS Center of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a guest lecturer for Maastricht University’s European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity. 

Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna is a member of the Reference Panel of the Global Privacy Assembly and a member of the T20 engagement group of the G20 under Brazil’s Presidency in 2024. She was a member of the Executive Committee of ACM's Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FaccT) Conference (2021-2022) and has experience in working for the European Data Protection Supervisor in Brussels, dealing with enforcement, litigation and policy matters, including having contributed to the work of the Article 29 Working Party. 

She holds a PhD in law with a thesis on the rights of the data subject from the perspective of their adjudication in civil law, and an LLM in Human Rights. Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna published a comprehensive volume on the rights of the data subjects in 2015 (Protectia datelor personale. Drepturile persoanei vizate", C.H. Beck, Bucharest, 2015), and is one of the co-authors of "GDPR: A commentary", Oxford University Press, 2020. In 2023, she received the Stefano Rodota Award of the Council of Europe together with her co-authors for the paper "The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making".