Ivana Dragičević
Ivana Dragičević was born in 1975 in Zagreb, Croatia. While still a student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, she looked for ways to express herself in the writing profession, taking part in launching a student magazine and later joining a group of emerging authors who found a space for their contributions in Vijenac, published by Matica hrvatska. The institutional ambience of Matica at that time stimulated the independent scene and with time its supplement Homo Volans rose to prominence. From such a publishing circle, backed by the tools of academia, Dragičević kept her approach to the public sphere as a permanent need for professional safety, a personal articulation of issues, and an awareness that the everyday image of reality is not only a material for media projections, but also a way of life with which a reporter and a commentator are in constant interaction. Although she was soon hired in an institutional domain, based on production that does not revise but compose texts – the national television broadcaster – she never ceased to seek professional advancement: she is an alumna of the Academy of Political Development, Reuters Foundation, ARD-ZDF Media Academy, United Nations Academy, Moscow School of Political Sciences and State Department’s IVLP programme. Moving across the world as a reporter, in the social reality she made a name for herself by the way how she speaks about the unknown and how she converses, on one hand with those from above who are trying to camouflage and mutate the messages, and on the other with those below who are struggling to articulate a way out of their crisis, even if this crisis is not so dramatic. This inner suppleness brought her to a rare authorial gesture, to illuminating our little stage from the outside as a world, and not as a collateral margin, as a story in which it makes sense to advocate for a defence of dignity, as well as possibilities. In her book Nejednaki she does not speak of defeat, in it she indeed makes a point of the Swiss watchmaker who deems himself a successful entrepreneur because he is – an artist.