Ivana Vaseva (b. Skopje, 1984) is a curator, researcher and author in the field of contemporary art and multidisciplinary, collaborative and socially engaged works and programmes. Her research interests include labour rights in the field of culture and the arts, as well as the ways and conditions of producing contemporary visual arts, institutionalised modernism as a general institutional framework to be challenged, and the creation of new models of participatory spaces through socially engaged art practices. She has curated numerous exhibitions and programmes at home and abroad and has edited several publications. Vaseva is the Programme Director of the Faculty of things that can't be learned (FR~U) and co-curator of the AKTO contemporary art festival since 2006. Her most recent work in connection with the AKTO Festival is the exhibition "Precarity has a chance: Public spaces in movement (toward)", which opened at Structura Gallery in Sofia in June 2023. Vaseva's aim with this exhibition is to present a selection of artists working in the field of contemporary visual art, who do not operate in isolated contexts, but who understand the political side of art and engage with contemporary socio-political and economic phenomena in an engaged way. For her project "This building talks truly", which represented North Macedonia at the 2019 Quadrennial of performance design and space in Prague, she won the prestigious Golden Triga Award for best exhibition (curated by the project). She was awarded the AICA - Macedonia "Ladislav Barishikj" Prize for her research project "Collective Action as a Political, and not an Organizational Decision" (2015, co-author) and the Special Architecture Award of the Association of Architects of Macedonia (2014, co-author).
