Manuela Siano is a lawyer and has been working at the Italian Data Protection Authority (GPDP) since 2003, in particular on EU-related and international matters.
She is actually Bureau Vice-Chair of the OECD DGP (Working Party on Data Governance and Privacy) for the 2025. She has also been actively involved in data protection at OECD level in the previous years by representing Italy in the WPSPDE (Working Party on Security and Privacy in the Digital Economy), of which she became Bureau Vice-Chair in 2012 and renominated for the following five years.
She has been designated by the Italian Government as Member of the OECD.AI Expert Group on AI, Data, and Privacy.
She is also particularly active in the G7 data protection and privacy authorities (having coordinated the G7 DPA Rome Roundtable work in the 2024) and in the Global Privacy Assembly (GPA) work.
She contributes regularly to the activity of the EDPB (European Data Protection Board), in particular by coordinating the work of the EDPB subgroup on data protection in the financial sector.
She is also involved, among the others, in the work on the EDPB Coordinated Enforcement Framework (CEF) and in the International Task force work.
She participated in several projects on data protection and gave legal advice in the field. As part of her research activity, she has authored scientific articles in fundamental rights and data protection issues on juridical journals and books. Between 2015-2017, she has been also High level Expert of the Task on “Privacy Performance and Ethics Assessment” in the BRIDGE-Health project, sponsored by the European Commission (CHAFEA). The activity produced a specialised paper, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Previously she worked at the European Commission (Secretariat General) and at the European Parliament (Constitutional Affairs Committee), providing contributions and running research activities for the European Convention (2001-2002).
She took a summa cum laude Degree in Law at the University of Naples Federico II, a Ph.D. in Administrative Law and Science Administration at the aforementioned University, and a Master "Legal defense of the Public Administrations" at the Italian High School of Economy and Finance.