Jasmina Tešanovic - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Jasmina Tešanović (born March 7, 1954) is an author, feminist, political activist (Women in Black

Women in Black

Women in Black is a women's anti-war movement with an estimated 10,000 activists around the world. The first group was formed by Israeli women in Jerusalem in 1988, following the outbreak of the First intifada.-History:...

, Code Pink

Code Pink

Code Pink: Women for Peace is an anti-war group that is mainly composed of women. It has regional offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and many more chapters in the U.S. as well as several in other countries...

), translator, and filmmaker.

Born in Beograd (Belgrade), SFRJ Jugoslavija. Her mother, Vera Stefanovic Tesanovic was a pediatrician, and her father Gojko Tesanovic was an engineer and an economist. Both were active members of the 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 Universita' Statale di Milano 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 Miclos Jancso's movie "Private Vices Public Virtues," shot in Ormos, former Yugoslavia. She lived with actress Laura Betti

Laura Betti

Laura Betti was an Italian actress.Born Laura Trombetti in Bologna, this blonde and flamboyant actress started her career as jazz singer. Betti made her film debut in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita. In 1963 she became a close friend of the poet and movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom...

where she met and befriended director Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...

.

In 1976 she graduated Lettere Moderne at the Universita' Statale di Milano with a thesis on Andrej Tarkovski with professor Adelio Ferrero.

In 1977, she collaborated with Umberto Silva on the movie "Difficile morire."

In 1978, together with Zarana Papic and Dunja Blazevic, she organized the first Feminist Conference in Eastern Europe bringing Italian feminists (Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini is an Italian writer. She is the daughter of Sicilian Princess Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, an artist and art dealer, and of Fosco Maraini, a Florentine ethnologist and mountaineer of mixed Ticinese, English and Polish background who wrote in particular on Tibet and Japan...

, 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 Vladic.

She translated Italian authors such as Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

, Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, perhaps best known for her novel La storia .-Biography:...

, Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....

, Sandro Veronesi

Sandro Veronesi

Sandro Veronesi, born in Prato, Tuscany in 1959, is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of...

, Andrea de Carlo

Andrea De Carlo

Andrea De Carlo is a popular Italian writer.-Biography:Andrea De Carlo grew up in Milan. His "love-hatred" relationship with the capital of Lombardy would come to be detailed in his novels...

, and Aldo Busi

Aldo Busi

Aldo Busi is an Italian writer and translator mostly active in the last twenty years.He was born in Montichiari in Lombardy. He is the author of Seminar on Youth and Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant...

, and published an anthology of contemporary Italian literature within Yugoslavia.

She worked as the assistant director and writer with Zivojin Pavlovic 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 the Milosevic' s regime: Women in Black

Women in Black

, Women Studies, etc. In 1994, together with Slavica Stojanovic, 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 1999 Kosovo War 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 Pavicevic, founder of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, with additional prizes to Biljana Srbljanovic and Jasmina Tesanovic, Serbian authors and peace activists.

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

Personal

Tešanović was married to Serbian poet Raša Livada with whom she has a daughter. She was in a relationship with Serbian writer David Albahari

David Albahari

David Albahari is a Serbian writer of Jewish origin from Kosovo, residing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Albahari writes mainly novels and short stories. He is also an established translator from English into Serbian. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts...

. During the nineties, she was married to journalist and writer Dušan Veličković

Dušan Veličković

Dušan Veličković is a Serbian writer, journalist and filmmaker.- Biography :Veličković was born in Belgrade in 1947....

In 2005, she married American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

writer Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling

Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...

Non-fiction

Dizajn Zlocina, Sudjenje skorpionima (VBZ Sarajevo, Zagreb, Beograd 2009)
Processo agli Scorpioni (Edizioni XII, 2008, Stampa Alternativa, 2009, Italy)
Matrimony (Planeta Publisher, Barcelona, Spain, 2003, Feminist Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia, 2004)
Me and My Multicultural Street (Feminist Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia, 2001)
Diary of a Political Idiot (Cleis Press, San Francisco, California, 2000) — published in 12 languages
The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (University of California Press, Berkley, San Francisco, California, 1997)

Fiction

Nefertiti (Stampa Alternativa, Italy 2009)
The Necromancers/Nekromanti (play, 2007)
Nefertiti Was Here/Nefertiti je bila ovde (Belgrade Women's Studies, Centar za Zenske Studije, Beograd 2007)
They just do it (play, Feminist Notebooks, Belgrade, Serbia 1998)
The Mermaids (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1997) — Borislav Pekić
Borislav Pekic
Borislav Pekić was a Serbian writer. He was born in 1930, to a prominent family in Montenegro, at that time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. From 1945 until his immigration to London in 1971, he lived in Belgrade...

Award recipient

A Women’s Book (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1996)

In Exile (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1994)

The Invisible Book (KOV, Vrsac, Yugoslavia 1992)

Essays and short stories
This list is not exhaustive.

"All Patients are Refugees" (Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies, edited by Sayantani Das Gupta and Marsha Hurst, The Kent State University Press, 2007)

"Baghdad/Belgrade Correspondence" (Writing the World: On Globalization, editors Wandee Pryor and Rothenberg, MIT Press, Boston Massachusetts 2005)

"Letter to My Imaginary American Friend" (Stop the Next War, editors Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, Inner Ocean, San Francisco, California 2005)
"We Are All Women In Black" (Women on War, edited by Daniela Gioseffi, Feminist Press, New York, New York, 2003)
"Mermaids, Ljubica" (short stories) (Casablanca Serbia, editor Nicole Janigro, Feltrinelli, Milan, Italy 2003)
The Diary of a Political Idiot (Granta 67, Autumn, London, UK 1999)
"Lies and Secrets" (Index on Censorship, London, UK 1999)
Many short essays published on the blog Boing Boing
Boing Boing
Boing Boing is a publishing entity, first established as a magazine, later becoming a group blog.-History:...

, including "The Long Goodbye", concerning the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
"Ja i moja multikulturalna ulica" (Feminist 94, Belgrade, 2001; translated into English as "Me and my multicultural street" in Bojana Kovačević’s Master's thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació, Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2008)
Other writings for newspapers and TV including Serbian weekly NIN; Serbian daily Nasa Borba; The Washington Post; Philadelphia Inquirer; L'Espresso; Panorama; ABC TV; El Pais; Al Jazeera; Flair; Grazia. She has a column in La Stampa, Italy, "I Globalisti" (together with her husband Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...

) and Yellow Cab, Belgrade, Boing Boing.

Films

Difficile Morire, artistic collaboration on Umberto Silva's film, (Rome 1977)
Mother and Sinner, with Rade Vladic (Belgrade 1978)
Morning Midday Evening, with Rade Vladic, film based on a short story by David Albahari (Belgrade 1978)
Nefertiti Was Here (Belgrade 1978)
Nefertiti Was Here in Belgrade (Belgrade 2003)
Jasmina's Diary, with Dinko Tucakovic (Belgrade 1999)
Stencil Art in Serbia (Belgrade 2007)
A Minute to Twelve (Belgrade 2007)
Invisible Cities (Belgrade 2008)
Rafts (Belgrade 2008)
Participation (Belgrade 2008)
Blogs (Belgrade 2008)
Recycling Romany (Belgrade 2008)

External links

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