Beka Vučo
Founder and President
Born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Beka’s life has been dedicated to culture, democracy, human rights and international understanding. After graduating from Belgrade University’s Faculty of Philosophy and the University of Arts, she worked for over fifteen years as the Producing and Managing Director of the prestigious avant-garde Theatre Atelje 212 and BITEF festival in Belgrade. As a Fulbright scholar (1979-81), Beka completed her master’s degree in performing arts and business management at UCLA.
After moving to the U.S. in 1987, Beka was affiliated with various regional and off-Broadway performing arts organizations that worked closely with Eastern Europe and Russia, including Theatre International Exchange Service (TIES), at that time, an Open Society Foundation’s grantee.
In 1991, at the time when George Soros was opening his foundations in Eastern Europe, Beka joined Open Society Foundations as the Regional Director and helped establish offices in the Western Balkans. She was affiliated with OSF for three decades. Much of her work at OSF focused on support for democratization, culture, equality and human rights.
Beka is also an accomplished photographer with published works in magazines, books, solo and group exhibits in New York and Washington, DC and Europe. Her interest in photography is inherited from her father, Nikola Vučo, whose own photography was part of the creative output of the surrealist movement of the 20th century Paris. Beka’s ongoing portfolio My Balkans gives a personal view of the turbulent history of the region since 1991.
Presently, she holds the position of the Chair of the No Borders Orchestra Board, a Berlin/Belgrade based classical music orchestra with musicians who come from all the countries from the former Yugoslavia with a mission of sharing friendship, peace and reconciliation through music.
In 2020 Beka founded and is the President of a New York based non-for-profit organization My Balkans Inc. to promote and help various activities in the field of culture, arts and education to organizations and individuals in South Eastern Europe and the Balkans, who are fighting for freedom of expression, social openness, artistic excellence, educational advancement and societies that promote justice and equality.
Edin Rudić
Director and Secretary
Edin Rudić is the Executive Creative Director for MKDA New York, an acclaimed corporate interior design firm. He joined MKDA in 2006 and has been integral to the creative direction of this national company. Working on large-scale corporate projects with clients such as Snapchat, Kind, Friedman LLP and Cambridge University Press, he has played a major role in helping MKDA achieve its current status as one of the nation’s preeminent design firms, prominently recognized on the list of 100 Interior Design Giants.
In his role he has helped reposition some of the most premiere office properties in New York City, working with major city property owners such as Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties, Equity Office, Normandy Real Estate Partners, Silverstein Properties and Thor Equities.
Edin was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Known as the “European Jerusalem,” Sarajevo is where East meets West, a place where the Jewish, Catholic, Christian Orthodox and Muslim religions coexisted and thrived in harmony for centuries and where empires from Roman to Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian have left a trail of cultural wealth.
The war in Bosnia broke out in 1992 and Sarajevo fell under a military siege. In the midst of the horror of living in the torched city, Edin entered the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts. In February 1994, with the help of American journalists John Falk and Sebastian Junger, he escaped the siege and moved as a refugee to Bologna, Italy. His first art show named “On the Edge” was exhibited at Libreria Feltrinelli International.
Later that year, he relocated to New York City and was admitted to The School of Visual Arts, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. During that time, Edin volunteered for the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, working closely with its spokeswoman, actress Sigorney Weaver, to extend the 1-year Political Asylum deadline. In 1997, he was called to testify before the United States Senate on this issue.
In 2002, Edin earned a Masters in Science, Interior Design at Pratt Institute. After working for one of the most prestigious NYC residential designers, Jeffrey Billguber, he was recruited to serve as a designer and art director on two home makeover TV shows, Katie Brown and Surprise by Design on the A&E and Discovery channels.
Since 2003, Edin’s focus has shifted to large-scale corporate interiors. His interior design work has frequently been recognized in leading publications, including Interior Design, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Committed to his passion for fine arts, Edin continues to exhibit his paintings and sculptures.
Bojana Cvejić
Director
Bojana Cvejić (Belgrade, 1975) is a performance theorist working in dance and philosophy. A graduate (BA, MA) from the University of Arts, Belgrade, Bojana followed two tracks in her twenties. She staged five music-theater productions in alternative venues in Belgrade from Cinema Rex (1996), Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for BEMUS festival (2005) at the Museum of Yugoslavia, and lastly, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni with an international cast of singers and Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra with Premil Petrović as conductor for BITEF (2008) in a large site-specific setting (Sajam, Belgrade fair). From 2001 until 2017, Bojana is the co-founding member of TkH (Walking Theory) editorial collective in Belgrade, with whom she realizes many research and performance projects, including TkH Walking Theory Journal for Performing Arts Theory which she co-edited a few volumes of. As a member of TkH and independently, Bojana took part in numerous regional collaborations with partner organizations on the independent scenes of Zagreb and Ljubljana, such as Maska, Frakcija and BADco.
With Ana Vujanović and Marta Popivoda, Bojana investigated “Performance and the Public” at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers 2010-12, Paris, resulting in the book Public Sphere by Performance (co-written with Vujanović, Berlin, bbooks, 2012). Her forthcoming book is Toward a Transindividual Self, co-written with Vujanović (Berlin, Archive books).
From 2000-2003, Bojana shared her time between Belgrade and Brussels, where she wrote for and performed in experimental theater with the Dutch theater director Jan Ritsema, produced by Kaaitheater (Brussels). With TODAYulysses (2001) and Pipelines, a construction (2002), Cvejić and Ritsema toured many cities in Europe (from Portugal to Norway, from Germany to Croatia etc.) and performed at prestigious festivals such as Wiener Festwochen.
Since 2001, Bojana teaches at P.A.R.T.S., contemporary dance school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, with whom she published book-cum-DVD A Choreographer’s Score (Brussels, Mercator 2011-2013).
In 2013, Bojana co-curated the exhibition Danse-Guerre at Musée de la danse, Rennes. She has made two videos “… in a non-wimpy way” (with Steve Paxton) and “Yvonne Rainer’s WAR”, presented at Musée de la Danse (Rennes), Culturgest Lisbon and Red Cat in Los Angeles. In 2014, she devised a choreography and lecture program Spatial Confessions at Tate Modern.
After completing her PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (London, 2013), Bojana published Choreographing Problems (Palgrave, 2015). Since 2017, she is Professor of Dance and Dance Theory at Oslo National Academy of Arts KhiO and lives between Brussels and Oslo.
