American Metaverse Association

US Metaverse Association Official Report | April 2025

The US Metaverse Association is honored to award the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award to Ms. Maria Gonzalez, cultural heritage advocate and project leader from Spain, in recognition of her decades-long dedication to preserving, digitizing, and reimagining world heritage through metaverse technologies.

As the head of the Metaverse Cultural Heritage Preservation Project, Ms. Gonzalez has pioneered the integration of immersive technology, virtual reconstruction, and participatory storytelling to safeguard and celebrate endangered cultural landmarks, oral histories, and indigenous knowledge systems. Her work bridges the past and the future—ensuring that the world’s most fragile cultural legacies remain alive, accessible, and meaningful in the digital age.

“Maria Gonzalez has done what few dared to dream: bringing ancient civilizations into the immersive world,” stated the Association’s President during the ceremony. “Through her efforts, the metaverse becomes more than entertainment or commerce—it becomes a global archive of memory, identity, and human expression.”

For more than 25 years, Ms. Gonzalez has collaborated with UNESCO, European museums, indigenous communities, and academic institutions to digitally restore historical sites lost to war, climate change, or urbanization. Her team’s work includes photogrammetry-driven reconstructions of Moorish architecture in Andalusia, interactive recreations of pre-Columbian art, and the world’s first decentralized museum of intangible heritage built entirely in the metaverse.

A central theme of her work is cultural equity—ensuring that underrepresented cultures, minority languages, and oral traditions are not only preserved but dynamically interpreted in immersive formats. Her framework for “Community-Centered Virtual Curation” has been adopted in over 12 countries and translated into multiple local languages.

Ms. Gonzalez has also served on the European Commission’s Advisory Board for Cultural Technologies and is a founding member of the Global Alliance for Digital Heritage in the Metaverse (GADHM). Her publications and lectures have inspired a new generation of curators, technologists, and educators to see the metaverse as a tool for cultural resilience.

The Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest honor granted by the US Metaverse Association, recognizing individuals whose work has made a lasting and transformative impact on the evolution of the metaverse. Ms. Gonzalez exemplifies how technology can be a vessel of empathy, memory, and global understanding.

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Gonzalez said: “Cultural heritage is not just something to be looked at—it is something to be lived. If the metaverse is to serve humanity, it must preserve the soul of our shared history. This award belongs to every elder, every storykeeper, and every community that chose not to disappear.”

Ms. Gonzalez will present her latest initiative, Virtual Patrimonia 2030, at the Global Metaverse Innovation Summit 2025, to be held this October in Palo Alto, California.