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

Her work mobilizes space as praxis, shaping choreography as both intervention and reflection. Her research investigates the political potential of spaces and sites, approaching them as assembling modalities and choreographic procedures. It delves into the possibilities of engaging 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 history, urban studies, 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 the Emilio Ambasz Institute at MoMA, Princeton University, Yale University, the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, the City University of New York, The New School, Kingston University London, the University of Glasgow, Ruhr University Bochum, the Dance Studies Association, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montréal, among others.