Vesna Meštrić
Vesna Meštrić is an art historian, curator and museum professional, appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2024. She has been working at MSU since 2005, where her professional practice has been closely connected to the museum’s collections, archives and research-based exhibition making. She was head of the Richter Collection, Marie-Luise Betlheim Collection, and, from 2023, Head of the Collection Department.
Her research and curatorial interests focus on contemporary art, post-war avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices, and the intersections of art, architecture, film, animation and time-based media. Her work is particularly concerned with collection-based research, the reinterpretation of museum holdings, and the role of collections and archives as active sites of knowledge production, public engagement and institutional practice.
She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Vjenceslav Richter: Rebel with a Vision, for which she received the annual award of the Croatian Society of Art Historians for Best Exhibition in 2017, Tomislav Gotovac a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer: Ascending Descending Genealogy, From Imagination to Animation: Six Decades of Zagreb Film; and Animafest Zagreb 1972–2022. She was also coordinator and co-author of the EU research project Bauhaus – Networking Ideas and Practice and educational project Runaway Art.
She participates in international conferences, research projects and professional programmes on contemporary art, museum practice and collection-based research. In 2017, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she took part in MoMA’s inaugural workshop on the care of time-based media artworks in museum collections.
