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, research 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 research presentations:

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 Program, 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 Stream, Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies, Boston, November 23, 2024.

My research examines the political potential of spaces and sites. It delves into the possibilities of thinking with spatial environments, illuminating frictions between bodies, spaces, and temporalities. It explores liminal spaces, fragments and residues, sparse archival traces, and non-linear narratives while challenging field demarcations in knowledge production. It investigates peripheral and neglected archives and works to reimagine methodologies in scholarship, practice, and research.

My research connects dance studies, dance theory, and dance history, art history and political theory in Central and Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, and Croatia; space, site, and text in experimental dance; architecture and urbanism; experimental cinema and media; modernism, postmodernism, contemporaneity, and avant-garde; continental philosophy, Marxist feminism, critical theory, decolonial and postcolonial studies, and poststructuralism; post-qualitative research and diffractive methodology; and practice-as-research, artistic research, choreographic research, and choreographic inquiry.

I received my Ph.D. in Dance Studies from Ohio State University in the summer of 2024, with a dissertation titled A Dance Studio as a Process and a Structure: Space, Cine-Materiality, Choreography, and Revolution—Zagreb, 1949-2010. The study examines dance studios as spatial processes of the political at the intersection of experimental choreography, architecture, and cinema along Yugoslavia’s political project, tracing its socialist and post-socialist periods. Dissertation Committee: Dr. Harmony Bench, Chair (Department of Dance), Dr. Hannah Kosstrin (Department of Dance), Dr. Philip Armstrong (Department of Comparative Studies), and Dr. Erica Levin (candidacy) (Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts).

The dissertation examines the dance studio and its built environment, exploring the relationship between dance and space. A focal point is the concept of the dance studio, analyzed through urban landscapes, experimental art practices, and the spatial history of cinema, encompassing the period from the 1950s to the 2010s in the city of Zagreb. Dance is examined as entangled with spatial structures and is expanded by their horizons, outcomes, and histories. A dance studio emerges as a hypothesis built in the process—a space at the intersection of context and time, and dance as an archival record embedded in spatial and societal change. The dissertation argues that this very process constitutes a dance studio’s structure: a space, practice, and environment made possible—reimagined, shaped, and hypothesized through the lens of dance and its experimental inquiry. The study approaches spaces and practices from the vantage point of the long contemporaneity, extending across both modernism and postmodernism, facilitating the juxtaposition and productive friction of these terms. The city is approached as a dynamic multitude, encompassing a range of changes in the socialist and post-socialist periods that influenced, challenged, and shaped art, dance artists, and their spaces between 1949 and 2010.