Tatjana Bijelić — MuseumsQuartier Wien

Overview

Tatjana Bijelić, a writer, editor, translator, and full professor at the English Department, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is participating in the Artists-in-Residence Programme at MuseumsQuartier Vienna.

Residency Details

• Period: July – August 2026
• Location: MuseumsQuartier Vienna
• Recommending Institution: BMEIA WiR

About the Artist

Bijelić teaches Anglophone literatures with research focused on modern and contemporary literature, migrant and transnational writing, post-Yugoslav literature, women's writing, creative writing, and ecocriticism. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Culture in English from Oxford Brookes University (2001) and a PhD in Anglo-American Literature from the University of Banja Luka (2007). She has held prestigious international fellowships including a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at Columbia University (2014/15) and a Weiser Fellowship at the University of Michigan (2019). Her published works include three award-winning poetry collections and recent novels shortlisted for major regional awards.

Project

During her residency, Bijelić will work on a novel combining storytelling with critical inquiry. The project explores displacement as both a material and psychological condition, tracing how transgenerational matrilineal heritage shapes identities across borders and shifting geographies. At the center are women whose lives are marked by turbulent socio-political circumstances and processes of personal reinvention. The text examines the enduring presence of female ancestors as spectral yet formative forces whose unresolved histories permeate contemporary experience. Particular attention is given to the symbolic and affective dimensions of clothing, exploring how garments, costumes, and acts of disguise mediate identity and carry cultural memory. By weaving together fiction and theoretical reflection, the project seeks to articulate a poetics of travel and inheritance in which narrative becomes a site for negotiating continuity and change.