Profile

My research explores spatial dimensions of dance, exploring how environments, historical conditions, and embodied practices shape choreographic possibilities. I examine how dance produces knowledge through bodies, spaces, materials, and temporalities. My research brings together studio-based movement practices, dance history and theory, archival investigation, site-based research, and urban and media studies. I work across dance theory and history; spatial theory and urban studies; experimental cinema and media; practice-as-research; artistic research; and choreographic inquiry.

Choreographic Research, Artistic Work, and Studio Practice

My choreographic work is based on research processes and approaches choreography as a method of inquiry and a mode of thinking. Choreography becomes a lens for examining perception, spatial relations, historical conditions, and possibilities of collective experience. Site-specific and space-based, my works have been developed for museums, galleries, and public spaces, engaging with the architectures, histories, and conditions of specific environments. They function as choreographic interventions within the fields of performance, visual arts, and media arts, proposing choreography as a spatial and temporal object in movement that continuously transforms through bodies, environments, materials, and encounters.

My most recent choreographic series, Reconstructions (2025–2026–2027) explores relationships between choreography, landscape, materiality, and processes of transformation. Through durational, site-responsive performances, the series investigates how bodies encounter architectural and ecological environments, engaging questions of memory, histories, and temporal change. Developed for museums, it activates relationships between movement, place, and material traces.

My ongoing studio-based movement practice, Sensitive Dances, investigates how movement transforms relationships between body, space, and time. The practice proposes that any temporally and spatially structured movement can constitute a complete dance. Moving beyond models of optimization, it attends to movement as it appears: through duration, attention, and presence. It explores movement that emerges without pressure, activates the body, and dissolves back into space. The practice investigates embodiment, spatial awareness, and the conditions through which movement becomes meaningful.

Doctoral Research

I received my Ph.D. in Dance Studies from Ohio State University in 2024. My dissertation, A Dance Studio as a Process and a Structure: Space, Cine-Materiality, Choreography, and Revolution—Zagreb, 1949–2010, examines the dance studio as a site where bodies, ideas, technologies, and histories are continuously organized and transformed. Dissertation Committee: Dr. Harmony Bench, (Department of Dance), Dissertation Advisor; Dr. Hannah Kosstrin (Department of Dance), Dr. Philip Armstrong (Department of Comparative Studies), Dr. Erica Levin (Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts), Candidacy.

The dissertation examines dance practice as entangled with spatial structures and expanded through their horizons, outcomes, and histories. A dance studio emerges as a space where dance archives and reconfigures spatial and societal transformations. The dissertation argues that this very process constitutes the structure of a dance studio: a space, practice, and environment continually reimagined, shaped, and conceptualized through dance and its experimental inquiry. Situated within the broader context of Central and Eastern Europe, the project contributes to discussions of avant-garde and experimental practices by examining how dance engages questions of modernity, artistic labor, and political imagination.

Pedagogy: Dance as Knowledge Making, Collaboration, and Process

My pedagogy brings together embodied practice, critical theory, and historical inquiry, emphasizing student agency, interdisciplinary thinking, and multiple ways of engaging with movement. Drawing from movement inquiry, somatic practices, investigations of dance forms, spatial theories, dance studies, and choreographic research, I invite students to examine how bodies inhabit and transform spaces while exploring dance as movement practice, artistic practice, research process, and a contemporary mode of critical knowledge production.

My teaching approaches dance as an inclusive field of inquiry, with multiple entry points for students from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and levels of movement training. I understand movement not only as a performative practice, but as a way of thinking, sensing, and engaging with the world. Through attention to perception, embodiment, and spatial relationships, dance becomes a practice of creative exploration, reflection, recuperation, and renewed focus.

I integrate theoretical and practical approaches across studio-based dance practice, site-specific movement inquiry, choreography and choreographic research, dance history and theory, performance studies, and movement research. My courses create environments where students develop analytical, creative, and embodied forms of understanding while exploring dance as a practice of knowledge-making, collaboration, and discovery.

Research Presentations, Lectures, and Panels

Upcoming, Fall 2026

Conference Paper Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Dance Studies Association, themed Speculative Choreographies: Bodies, Economies, and Movement in a World in Flux, California State University, Long Beach, October 24, 2026.

Conference Paper Presentation at the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, themed States and Empires, Chicago, IL, November 14, 2026.

Spring 2026

Co-Convener and Chair of the Organizing Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Symposium Dance and Its Texts: Archives, Criticism, and Futures, Zagreb, April 15-16, 2026.

Exam Procedures—Poiesis and Praxis at the Threshold of the Book: Reading for Theory and the Discursive-Choreographic Transformation, paper presentation at the arts and humanities research symposium Dance and Its Texts: Archives, Criticism, and Futures, Zagreb, April 15, 2026.

Kinetic Rhythm as a Gesture: The Choreo-Cinematic Polyphony of Vera Maletić’s 1968 film ‘A Choreography for Camera and Dancers’, paper presentation at the artistic research symposium How do we rethink gesture?; Zagreb, March 28, 2026.

Presentation of the doctoral dissertation: A Dance Studio as a Process and a Structure: Space, Cine-Materiality, Choreography, and Revolution—Zagreb, 1949-2010, at the Department of Dance, University of Zagreb, March 10, 2026.

2025

Spatial Echoes: Choreographic Structures Shaped by Urban Environments in Zagreb and Eastern Europe, research presentation, Urban Humanities Conference 2, Washington University in St. Louis, October 16, 2025.

A Room for Movement: Ana Maletić’s 1932 Dance Studio in Zagreb as a Space, School, and Experiment of the Modern Body, research presentation, Conference Architecture and Housing Culture in Zagreb and Central European Cities 1880-1940, Institute of Art History in Zagreb, October 9, 2025.

Through Choreography and Sound: Critical Practice of Spatial Thinking, Research Talk, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Antisezona, June 28, 2025.

Kinetic Rhythm: The Choreo-Cinematic Rhythm in Vera Maletić’s 1968 Film ‘A Choreography for Camera and Dancers’, Rethinking Rhythm in Film Symposium at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, May 22, 2025.

Reimagining Dance and Imagining Revolution: Marija Leaves the Theater in Branko Marjanović’s 1949 Film ‘The Flag’, Conference Resistance Movement Art of Yugoslav Partisans – How to Think About It, How to Remember It at Subversive Festival: An Interdisciplinary Platform for Film and Critical Theory, Zagreb, May 15, 2025.

Unfolding Spaces: Avant-Garde Engagements, Experimental Choreography, and Politics of Space in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni’s ‘La voix du silence’ at the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb, Music Biennale Zagreb, April 7, 2025.

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.

Research as Resistance: Dance Research as Methodology, Inquiry, and Political Practice, panel lecture, Transformative Policies for Dance—Futuring: Dance Research as the Foundation of a New Dance Institution, Choreographic Convention Zagreb, November 20, 2024.

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

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

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, lecture at the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Ohio State University, March 29, 2024.