Dragana Jurišić is a Croatian-born photographer, writer, and filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. She grew up in Slavonski Brod, a town in present-day Croatia that was then part of Yugoslavia. Her practice is shaped by the loss of her family home and its archives during the Yugoslav Wars, an event that became a turning point in her life and art. She later completed an MFA in Documentary Photography, distinguishing herself in the field, and currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University, where she combines academic work with a prolific creative career.

Jurišić’s visual language is intensely personal and often uses archival imagery, domestic objects, and the body as sites of memory. Rather than documenting wartime events directly, she explores how personal and collective histories are negotiated after trauma. Her method frequently involves reconstructing or re-imagining lost images, working with family snapshots, and collaborating with subjects who share similar displacement. This approach sets her apart from conventional photojournalists by privileging emotional truth over factual reportage, and from conceptual artists by grounding her work in lived experience and autobiography.

Her landmark photobook YU: The Lost Country (2014) brought her international attention. The project is a layered, first-person account of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, weaving together photographs, texts, and familial recollections to reflect on the impossibility of returning to a place that no longer exists. Another significant body of work, the ongoing What I Could Not Say, addresses systemic gender-based violence and the difficulty of speaking about buried experiences. In it, she collaborates with women who have endured abuse, using fragmented portraits and text to create spaces for testimony. Both projects demonstrate her sustained interest in voicing the silenced and giving form to the inexpressible.

Jurišić has exhibited extensively across Europe and beyond, winning numerous national and international awards. Her work has been featured in photography magazines such as 1000 Words and covered by major art publications. She has also faced censorship and platform removal—her Instagram account was deleted and her work censored on Facebook—which underscores the political charge of her imagery. These incidents highlight how her art continues to disrupt comfortable narratives about memory, warfare, and gender. She is active in academic and artistic communities, frequently lecturing and giving podcasts that reflect on her formative experiences during the Balkans conflict.

For photobook collectors, Jurišić’s books are valuable not only for their raw content but for their material and design choices. YU: The Lost Country, often cited as an entry point, pairs deliberately sequenced photographs with resonant texts to mimic the fragmented process of remembering. Her publishing collaborations are thoughtful, with attention to paper, layout, and the tactile quality of the object. Collectors who seek work that confronts history with intimacy, and that challenges the boundaries between documentary and memoir, will find her publications compelling additions to a serious photography library.

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