I am Ana, a Chicago-based project leader with a background in education, non-profits, and public programs. I hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University, and my work centers performance and art-making in people’s efforts to deal with collective harm and craft hopeful futures. I am the author of Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies (Bloomsbury) and my writing can be found in Environmental Humanities, Southern Cultures, and American Anthropologist, among other publications. I am a research associate with the Field Museum, a visiting research scholar with The Graduate School at CUNY, and I sit on the boards of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, and ŠTO TE NEMA.

I am a girl from the middle. I have great affection for the Mississippi River (I was born at its head and lived for some years at its mouth) but my heart is at the southern tip of its longtime sister, Lake Michigan, in metro-Chicago, where I grew up and raised my son.