Sue E. Berryman

Sue E. Berryman obtained her B.A. from Pomona College in English literature and creative writing and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in political economy. She taught at the Harvard Business School, was a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation for 12 years, directed the Institute of Education and the Economy at Columbia University, and ended her career at the World Bank, from which she retired but for which she still consults. At the World Bank she focused on public expenditure reviews of the education sectors of developing countries on multiple continents. These reviews preceded the Bank’s decisions to loan governments money for their education sectors. They assessed the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity with which governments used their own money to finance their education systems.

After her husband’s death, in 2019 she took an intensive three month course in Italy on art crime, studying the forensic and legal issues associated with the Janus-faced art world. Her professors included lawyers, archaeologists, experts in provenance, art insurance, and museum security, the retired head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad, and his counterpart in Italy’s Carabinieri unit that locates and claws back looted art from museums such as The Getty and Metropolitan Museum of Art. She wrote her first two art crime novels during the pandemic.

She is the Treasurer on the newly elected Board of Directors for her condominium in Old Town, Alexandria.

Born in California, she spent 10 years of her childhood in the Far East—Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. You wouldn’t want her to sing, and she plays no instrument. But her father sang in the Pomona College Glee Club all four of his undergraduate years. In his later years, he preferred tickets to the rehearsals of San Francisco’s Symphony Orchestra because those let him learn more about the structure and nuance of music. Through her father, she was drawn deeply and gratefully into music. Married twice, she had no children of her own. Through her second marriage, she has five step-children, 10 step-grandchildren, and four step-great grandchildren.