WIENWOCHE TEAM 2025

DIRECTORS AND FESTIVAL (CO)CURATORS

Nataša Mackuljak
Executive Director | natasa.mackuljak@wienwoche.org
Nataša Mackuljak (b. 1977 Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a performer, multimedia artist, social worker, curator and cultural producer. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, with the thesis On Historical Continuities between Anti-Fascist Women's Action and Feminist Performance Art in the Former Yugoslavia. For three years (2016/17/18) she worked as artistic director and managing director of Wienwoche, the international and transcultural festival for Art and Activism in Vienna. In November 2013, she completed her master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class for post-conceptual art practices with the performance „Bodies, Borders, and the Politics of Transition“. Her art projects deal with questions of migration, precarity and gender. She studied sciences and technology of multimedia at the University of Social Sciences in Udine and worked in Italy on media projects as radio and TV editor of weekly programmes on radio and TV Rai 3 (2005–2008). As a war refugee in the 1990s, she became involved in feminist anti-war movements in the former Yugoslavia: since 1994 she has been part of Woman in Black Belgrade; she was the co-founder and deputy leader of the Youth Peace Group Danube, Vukovar, Croatia (1997–2002); and she was an international project coordinator for youth issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the programme of the Swedish Embassy in Sarajevo (1999–2002).

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur
Artistic Director | araba.evelyn.johnston-arthur@univie.ac.at
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur is a transdisciplinary artistic cultural and memory worker, time traveller, researcher, curator, teacher, learner and researcher. She was a co-founder and activist of PAMOJA. Movement of the Young African Diaspora in Austria, the Network of African Communities (against institutional racism) and the research group on Black Austrian history. She has taught at the historically Black Howard University in Washington D.C., studied Black politics and history of the African diaspora and wrote her doctoral thesis on the pan-African, non-aligned critique of racism by Unokanma Okonjo and the Pan-African Students Union of Austria in post-Nazi Austria in the early 1960s. Together with Jelena Micić, she is currently artistic co-director of WIENWOCHE 2025, festival for art and activism and part of the directors' collective (link: https://musmig.co/ text: MUSMIG )(museum for migration), a museum that is still to be fought for, while at the same time already addressing the fundamental violence that usually underlies museums in Europe.

Jelena Micić
Artistic Director | jelena.micic@wienwoche.org
Jelena Micić (*1986 Knjaževac, Serbia) is an artist and curator. Jelena graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where they also worked as a study assistant at the Painting and Exhibition Management Department. During their studies, Jelena was involved in the Student Union at the Office for Social Policy and the Office for Economic Affairs. Jelena obtained a master's degree in Philosophy and a diploma degree in Philology at the University of Belgrade. In 2019 they managed the open working group I KNOW I CARE, as part of the WIENWOCHE Festival. Awarded the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award (2021), and Ö1 Talentestipendium Bildende Kunst (2018). As part of the kültür gemma! Fellowship (2018) in IG Bildende Kunst, Jelena was working on the PAY THE ARTIST NOW! campaign. Jelena is interested in socio-political aspects of color (systems), and economic conditions of labor and material. Jelena represents WIENWOCHE in the board of D-Arts Office for Diversity.