Dragana Jurišić

Special Award

Born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia (then Yugoslavia) and now living and working in Dublin, Dragana Jurišić received an MFA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales in 2008 and a PhD from the European centre for Photographic Research in 2013. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales till 2021 and makes deeply personal work exploring the power photography has over memory.

The story of her as a photographer began on the day in September 1991 when her family’s apartment burned down, together with thousands of prints and negatives her father, an ardent amateur photographer, had accumulated. She became a ‘refugee’ with no photographs, no past, and memories of the events and people she encountered before that day are either non-existent or very vague. Her work interrogates issues of gender, stereotyping, identity, and the effects of exile and displacement on memory. Working primarily with image, text and video installation, with plans to expand into sculpture, she has shown her work extensively in Ireland and abroad.

Dragana Jurišić applied for a Golden Fleece Award to provide the financial support that would enable her to take a step back from deadline-driven exhibition work and begin to research and develop new work for a number of upcoming projects – a book on 14 Henrietta Street (with poet Paula Meehan) and The Time of Empty Angels, a personal project exploring the internet’s relationship to media nihilism.