Marjana Krajač (Zagreb, Croatia) is a choreographer, researcher, artist, and writer specializing in the theory, history, research, and practice of experimental choreography, spatiality, and moving images. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University (US).

Her work mobilizes an overload of space as praxis, shaping choreography as an intervention and theory. Her research explores the political potential of spaces and sites, approaching them as aggregatory modalities and choreographic procedures. It delves into the possibilities of thinking with environments, illuminating frictions between bodies, spaces, and temporalities, further extended with experiments in camera, moving images, and their ruptures.

Her work explores symptoms and consequences of site and space. Her complex choreographic panoramas investigate materialities and durations, choreography as time-infused belonging to the built environment, while mobilizing spatial experiments in movement, camera, and media. She has created over 20 choreographic works commissioned by festivals, galleries, and performing arts venues.

Her work connects dance studies, critical theory, contemporary philosophy, and choreographic inquiry, often exploring liminal spaces, fragmented residues, sparse archival traces, and non-linear histories. She challenges demarcations and field limits in knowledge production, investigating unstable, peripheral, and neglected archives to reimagine methodologies and outcomes in dance studies, film studies, spatial humanities, and choreographic research.

Marjana’s texts have been published in New York’s Movement Research Performance Journal, Performing Arts Journal Frakcija, Journal for Dance Inquiry Movements, Body, Space & Technology Journal, and International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, among others. A collection of her essays was published as a book, titled choreographic journal: seeing / vidjeti.

She was an invited researcher at the Research Academy of the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Choreoroam Europe research project, led by The Place London (UK), Rotterdam Dansateliers (Netherlands), Opera Estate Festival (Italy), a-2/Certamen Choreography Paso de Madrid (Spain), and Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (Croatia). She collaborated with and participated in choreographic research projects with Meg Stuart and Mårten Spångberg, as well several academic research projects.

She graduated from the State Conservatory of Contemporary Dance Ana Maletić (Zagreb, Croatia); an 8-year program focused on contemporary dance, choreography, movement analysis, dance history, and experimental music, and from the Academy of Performing Arts in Berlin (Germany) with a BFA degree in Dance. She earned a Ph.D. degree in Dance Studies from Ohio State University (US) in the summer of 2024, holding positions of Dean’s Distinguished University Fellow, Graduate Fellow, and Graduate Teaching Associate.

She has presented her research at Princeton University, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, Kingston University of London, the Dance Studies Association, Central Eurasian Studies Association, Chapman University in Orange, California, the University of Glasgow, Ruhr University of Bochum, The New School, Saint Louis University in Madrid, and the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montréal, among others.

Recent research presentations:

Unfolding Spaces: Avant-Garde Environments, Experimental Choreography, and Politics of Space in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni’s ‘La voix du silence’ at the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb, presentation at DocTalk Series at the Emilio Ambasz Institute at MoMA, June 18, 2024.

Unfolding Spaces: Avant-Garde Horizons, Experimental Choreography, and Politics of Space in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni’s ‘La voix du silence’ at the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb, conference presentation at the European Studies Council, Yale University, May 9, 2024.

Marija Leaves the Theater: Reimagining the Dance Studio, Imagining Revolution, invited lecture at the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Ohio State University, March 29, 2024.

Upcoming:

Spatial Layers and New Forms: Movement Spaces at the Workers and People’s University Moša Pijade in Zagreb, research presentation, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Antisezona, October 17, 2024.

A Dance Studio as a Process and a Structure: Space, Cine-Materiality, Choreography, and Revolution—Zagreb, 1949-2010, dissertation research presentation at the East European and Eurasian Architecture Seminar in Topics in Architectural Theory at the Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University, October 21, 2024.

Rethinking Structure—New Forms: Movement Spaces at the Workers and People’s University Moša Pijade in Zagreb, conference presentation, New Yugoslav Studies, Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, Boston, November 23, 2024.