Marjana Krajač is a choreographer and choreographic researcher from Zagreb (Croatia), with a Ph.D. degree in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University (US).

Her choreographies were commissioned by numerous international institutions, theaters, venues, and festivals, and she has created more than 20 works in a wide range of formats. Her choreographic work explores symptoms, consequences, and temporalities of form, especially in relation to site, architecture, and space.

Her complex choreographic panoramas are frequently created in collaboration with contemporary and experimental music composers, and experiments in sound, structure, camera, and form at the core of her artistic processes. Her research focuses on the emancipatory potentials of dance, foregrounding contemporaneity as a structural practice, with an emphasis on site, media, text, and process.

She was awarded the Croatian Theatre Award for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement and the Annual Award of the Croatian Dance Artists Association for Choreographic Achievement of the Year (2014). The dance ensemble of her durational choreography variations on sensitive was awarded the best dance ensemble of the year (2015). In 2010, her work was nominated for the T-HT Award of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

She was an invited researcher at the Choreoroam Europe research project in choreography, led by CSC Bassano del Grappa: Opera Estate Festival (Italy), The Place London (UK), Rotterdam Dansateliers (Netherlands), a-2/Certamen Choreography Paso de Madrid (Spain), and Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (Croatia), and was mentored by choreographer Rosemary Butcher (2011). She collaborated and danced for and with numerous choreographers in Germany, France, and Croatia, and has participated in choreographic research projects with choreographers such as Meg Stuart and Mårten Spångberg, as well numerous academic research projects.

She graduated from the State Conservatory of Contemporary Dance Ana Maletić (Zagreb, Croatia); an 8-year program focused on contemporary dance, choreography, movement analysis, dance history, and experimental music, and from the Academy of Performing Arts in Berlin (Germany) with a BFA degree in Dance. She earned a Ph.D. degree in Dance Studies from Ohio State University (US) in the summer of 2024, holding positions of Dean’s Distinguished University Fellow, Graduate Fellow, and Graduate Teaching Associate.

She was a jury member of the Ana Roje Award, a ballet award at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. Her ballet for sixteen dancers titled dark landscapes, created for the Ballet of Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, premiered in November 2016 and was in the 2017/2018 repertoire.

Marjana has a sustained practice of writing about dance and choreography and her texts have been published in New York’s Movement Research Performance Journal, Croatian Performing Arts Magazine Frakcija, Croatian Journal for Dance Inquiry Kretanja/Movements, Body, Space, and Technology Journal, and International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, among others. In August 2018, a collection of her essays was published as a book, titled choreographic journal: seeing / vidjeti.

She is the artistic director of Sodaberg Choreographic Laboratory in Zagreb, a platform for research in choreography and dance.