Biography
Lana Lovrenčić graduated in Art History and Philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She received her PhD in 2025 from the Postgraduate Doctoral Programme in Humanities at the University of Zadar with the dissertation The Epistemological Potential of a Private Photographic Archive – The Archive of Photographer Petar Dabac, supervised by Sandra Križić Roban, PhD, with Vinko Srhoj, PhD, as co-supervisor. Since 2020, she has been employed at the Institute of Art History, first as a doctoral researcher on the project Ekspozicija. Themes and Aspects of Croatian Photography from the 19th Century to the Present, and since April 2026 as a senior research assistant in the Research Unit for Modern and Contemporary Art.
Her research interests include the history and theory of photography and photographic archives, post-Second World War architecture and urbanism, cultural heritage preservation, monuments and memorialisation, and memory studies. She is particularly interested in modernism and processes of modernisation, as well as the relationship between artistic and spatial phenomena and the broader social, political, and cultural contexts in which they emerge.
In the field of photography, she researches photographic archives and artists’ estates, with a particular focus on the archive of photographer Petar Dabac, combining the history and theory of photography with archival theory and archival studies. Another continuous strand of her research concerns the architecture and urbanism of the socialist period, particularly the architectural and urban development of the Zagreb Fair. She has been researching the Zagreb Fair since her graduate studies and her participation in the international project Unfinished Modernizations (2010–2012), and continues this research within the project Phenomena of Croatian Artistic Modernity (2023–2027).
Since 2010, she has been researching monuments dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle, focusing on the processes of their construction, spatial planning and memorial tourism, their preservation and social use, as well as their destruction and changing meanings following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She was one of the initiators of the international platform (In)Appropriate Monuments and a founding member of the Post-Socialist and Comparative Memory Studies working group within the Memory Studies Association. She has participated in the organisation of several international academic conferences in the field of memory studies, including Socialist Monuments and Modernism (2015), Post-War Monuments in Post-Communist Europe (2017), and Post-Socialist Memory in a Global Perspective: Postcolonialism, Post-Transition, Post-Trauma (2020). In 2026, she presented her recent research in post-socialist memory studies at the international conference Post-Socialist Memory in Times of Crises and Speculation in Yerevan.
She has participated in numerous national and international research projects and is the author and co-author of academic and professional publications and exhibitions in these fields. She also participated in the project The Silence That Brought Down the Monument, recipient of a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award. Alongside her academic research, she is engaged in curatorial and professional work, as well as in the preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage.