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Jelena Petrović is an interdisciplinary scholar, art theorist, and curator. She is the (co)author of texts, events, exhibitions, and projects related to new research models of knowledge and art production, focusing on feminist curating, art geographies, the politics of (non)belonging, and decolonial art-based practices.
She completed her PhD at ISH, Ljubljana Graduate School for Humanities, in 2009. During her studies, as both a researcher and assistant coordinator, she participated in several international gender studies projects on behalf of ISH (Athena 2003/2006/2009; Gemma 2009/2012, etc.). After completing her PhD, she continued her academic career by teaching gender-related interdisciplinary subjects (venia docendi in the field of anthropology, 2012-2015).
From 2008 to 2015, alongside her academic work, Petrović was a member of the art-theoretical group Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group), where she engaged with the diffcult subjects of the (post)Yugoslav war, violence, and genocide during the 1990s. Together with the Monument Group, her engagement in this field extended to participation in the ERC project Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London (2011-2015), as well as other related research initiatives and art events. In 2011, she co-founded the feminist curatorial collective Red Mined, with whom she co-curated the Living Archive series of exhibitions (2011-2015) in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Vienna, Stockholm, Munich, and more, as well as the 54th October Salon in Belgrade (2013). Building on this experience, she initiated the course Living Archive: Feminist Curatorship and Contemporary Artistic Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, where she taught as a guest professor (2014-2017).
From 2015 to 2017, Petrović held the position of Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She continued to work at the same Academy in 2019 as a senior researcher on her project The Politics of Belonging: Art Geographies (FWF Elise Richter Program 2019-2023). Her recent (co)curatorial practice includes research exhibitions at CITE Paris (2021) and VBKO Vienna (2023), as well as a series of programs related to art geographies at Vienna Contemporary (2020), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna/Mumok/Depot (2022), and VanAbbe Museum Eindhoven/KRAK Bihać (2022/2023), among others.
Her recent publications include two monographs: Women’s Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia: The Politics of Love and Struggle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and GEOPOLIS: The Politics of Belonging and Planetary Coexistence (Academy of Fine Arts and Sternberg Press, forthcoming 2025).
