Alan Cienki is Professor of Language Use and Cognition at the Vrije Universiteit/VU in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he has worked since 2006. There he established the Amsterdam Gesture Center. He also holds a part-time appointment as Professor at Moscow State Linguistic University in the Russian Federation where he founded the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab, known in Russian as PoliMod. Previously he worked at Emory University, Atlanta, USA in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, the Program in Linguistics (which he co-founded), and the Dept. of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research is based in cognitive linguistics, with a focus in recent years on spoken language and gesture. He is a co-editor of Metaphor and Gesture (Benjamins, 2008) and of the two-volume handbook Body–Language–Communication (De Gruyter, 2013, 2014). He is a former Chair of the international Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor/RaAM and is Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies/ISGS.