Jasmina Tešanović

Life and work

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her mother, Vera Stefanović Tešanović was a pediatrician, and her father Gojko Tesanovic was an engineer and an economist. Both were active members of Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Communist Party.

As a child she went to Cairo, Egypt with her parents where she attended the primary Port Said School in English. In Cairo she took piano lessons with Croatian pianist Melita Lorkovic. In 1966 her parents transferred to Milan, Italy where she attended the international School of Milan (British School). In 1971 she enrolled at University of Milan and studied Law School for two years which she abandoned to study Art and Cinema.

In 1975 she went to live in Rome after assisting Miklós Jancsó's movie Private Vices, Public Pleasures, shot in Ormož, Slovenia. She lived with actress Laura Betti where she met and befriended director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In 1976 she graduated Lettere Moderne at the University of Milan with a thesis on Andrei Tarkovsky with Prof. Adelio Ferrero. In 1977, she collaborated with Umberto Silva on the movie Difficile morire.

In 1978, together with Zarana Papić and Dunja Blazević, she organized the first Feminist Conference in Eastern Europe bringing Italian feminists (Dacia Maraini, Anne Marie Boetti, Letizia Paolozzi, etc.) into Yugoslavia. The international conference was condemned by the ruling Communist party as attempt to import western ideology into the country.

She did conceptual video performances at the student cultural center of Belgrade SKC ("Love is only a Matter of Words," "An Unedited Being," etc.) and shot short films together with Radoslav Vladić.

She translated Italian authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Sandro Veronesi, Andrea de Carlo, and Aldo Busi, and published an anthology of contemporary Italian literature within Yugoslavia.

She worked as the assistant director and writer with Zivojin Pavlović in the movie Zadah Tela which won major prizes at the Pula Film Festival (Croatia) in 1983.

At the beginning of the Balkan Wars in 1990 she became a pacifist and an active opponent of Slobodan Milošević's regime: Women in Black, Women Studies, etc. In 1994, together with Slavica Stojanović, she founded the feminist publishing house "Feminist 94."

Her first book of essays "The Invisible Book" became a manifesto for alternative Serbian feminist/pacifist culture. Since then she published several other fiction and essays books translated in several languages.

She is the author of Diary of a Political Idiot, a war diary written during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and widely distributed on the Internet. She has distributed essays, diaries, stories and films on blogs and other Internet media.

In 2004 the Hiroshima Prize for Peace and Culture was awarded to Borka Pavićević, founder of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, with additional prizes to Biljana Srbljanović and Jasmina Tešanović, Serbian authors and peace activists.

She is the member of the Norwegian PEN center. She writes in three languages: English, Italian and Serbian.

Tešanović founded Casa Jasmina, referred to as "the connected home of the future," together Bruce Sterling. Casa Jasmina is located in Turin, Italy.

Personal

She has a daughter. During the nineties, she was married to journalist and writer Dušan Veličković.

In 2005, she married American science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.

Filmography