About

My academic work has been largely shaped by my personal, transnational, experience and the duality of my professional background, which has involved me regularly traversing industry and academia. My view is that media and culture scholarship is at its strongest when its theoretical insights are informed and enlightened by practice in the field. My experience in communicating with non-academic audiences has influenced my methodological approach to researching my central focus of concern: political aspects of cultural and film festival programming in the context of ongoing turbulence, conflict and war. 

I was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1981, and as a teenager I joined the city radio station Studio B (1996), and its show Prekobrojni čas [Overtime Class], a unique kind of programme prepared by high-school students for their peers. Prekobrojni čas represented an important formative experience and my first step into the observation and analysis of cultural programmes. I was a member of the station’s last generation of trainees – during the NATO bombing of 1999, the show was stopped and never fully resumed. Throughout the 2000s, I collaborated with various Belgrade-based print and electronic media (B92, Index, Yellow Cab, Ludus) publishing stories on art and culture. After years of media coverage of various cultural events I wanted to explore what it was like to be working in the field of cultural management, among the people who were producing the events I was reporting on. In 2007 I briefly collaborated with the Paris-based avantgarde film label RE:VOIR, led by filmmaker Pip Chodorov, who inspired me to start writing about film festivals. At about the same time I started working for the Belgrade (Yugoslav) Documentary and Short Film Festival as international programme coordinator. Both my MA dissertations, in cultural management (University of Arts, Belgrade/Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008), and in cultural history (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yveliens, 2012) focused on this festival, which would also become the subject of my PhD thesis. Settling in France full time widely opened the doors of international intellectual exchanges: I completed my PhD training in cultural history, gained teaching experience (University Paris Saclay, 2012-2017) and started publishing and participating in academic events throughout Europe. 

These experiences have shaped both my interests as a researcher and my identity. My personal library is plurilingual, I write in English, French and Serbo-Croatian, and hold a dual citizenship, French and Serbian. This plurilingualism and transnationalism is enabling me to view complex geopolitical processes through what I hope is a more inclusive lens, in turn, fostering a more empathetic understandings of multiple cultural and political perspectives in contemporary Europe.  

Dunja Jelenkovic