Jasmina Tešanović

Jasmina Tesanović

Jasmina Tešanović (Serbian: Јасмина Тешановић) (born March 7, 1954) is an author, feminist, political activist (Women in Black, Code Pink), translator, and filmmaker.

Born in Beograd (Belgrade), SFRJ Jugoslavija. Her mother, Vera Stefanovic Tesanovic was a pediatrician, and her father Gojko Tesanovic was an engineer and an economist. Both were active members of the Tito's Yugoslav Communist party.

As a child she went to Cairo, Egypt with her parents where she attended the primary Port Said School in English. In Cairo she took piano lessons with Croatian pianist Melita Lorkovic. In 1966 her parents transferred to Milan, Italy where she attended the international School of Milan ( British School). In 1971 she enrolled at Universita' Statale di Milano and studied Law School for two years which she abandoned to study Art and Cinema.

In 1975 she went to live in Rome after assisting Miclos Jancso's movie "Private Vices Public Virtues," shot in Ormos, former Yugoslavia. She lived with actress Laura Betti where she met and befriended director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In 1976 she graduated Lettere Moderne at the Universita' Statale di Milano with a thesis on Andrej Tarkovski with professor Adelio Ferrero.

In 1977, she collaborated with Umberto Silva on the movie "Difficile morire."

In 1978, together with Zarana Papic and Dunja Blazevic, she organized the first Feminist Conference in Eastern Europe bringing Italian feminists (Dacia Maraini, Anne Marie Boetti, Letizia Paolozzi, etc.) into Yugoslavia. The international conference was condemned by the ruling Communist party as attempt to import western ideology into the country.

She did conceptual video performances at the student cultural center of Belgrade SKC ("Love is only a Matter of Words," "An Unedited Being," etc.) and shot short films together with Radoslav Vladic.

She translated Italian authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Sandro Veronesi, Andrea de Carlo, and Aldo Busi, and published an anthology of contemporary Italian literature within Yugoslavia.

She worked as the assistant director and writer with Zivojin Pavlovic in the movie "Zadah Tela" which won major prizes at the Pula film festival (Croatia) in 1983.

At the beginning of the Balkan wars in 1990 she became a pacifist and an active opponent of the Milosevic' s regime: Women in Black, Women Studies, etc. In 1994, together with Slavica Stojanovic, she founded the feminist publishing house "Feminist 94."

Her first book of essays "The Invisible Book" became a manifesto for alternative Serbian feminist/pacifist culture. Since then she published several other fiction and essays books translated in several languages.

She is the author of Diary of a Political Idiot, a war diary written during the 1999 Kosovo War and widely distributed on the Internet. She has distributed essays, diaries, stories and films on blogs and other Internet media.

In 2004 the Hiroshima Prize for Peace and Culture was awarded to Borka Pavicevic, founder of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, with additional prizes to Biljana Srbljanovic and Jasmina Tesanovic, Serbian authors and peace activists.

She is the member of the Norwegian PEN center. She writes in three languages; English, Italian and Serbian.

Personal

Tešanović was married to Serbian poet Raša Livada with whom she has a daughter. She was in a relationship with Serbian writer David Albahari.^{[citation needed]} During the nineties, she was married to journalist and writer Dušan Veličković

In 2005, she married American science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

• Dizajn Zlocina, Sudjenje skorpionima (VBZ Sarajevo, Zagreb, Beograd 2009)
• Processo agli Scorpioni (Edizioni XII, 2008, Stampa Alternativa, 2009, Italy)
• Matrimony (Planeta Publisher, Barcelona, Spain, 2003, Feminist Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia, 2004)
• Me and My Multicultural Street (Feminist Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia, 2001)
• Diary of a Political Idiot (Cleis Press, San Francisco, California, 2000) — published in 12 languages
• The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (University of California Press, Berkley, San Francisco, California, 1997)

Fiction

• Nefertiti (Stampa Alternativa, Italy 2009)
• The Necromancers/Nekromanti (play, 2007)
• Nefertiti Was Here/Nefertiti je bila ovde (Belgrade Women's Studies, Centar za Zenske Studije, Beograd 2007)
• They just do it (play, Feminist Notebooks, Belgrade, Serbia 1998)
• The Mermaids (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1997) — Borislav Pekić Award recipient
• A Women’s Book (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1996)
• In Exile (Publisher 94, Belgrade, Serbia 1994)
• The Invisible Book (KOV, Vrsac, Yugoslavia 1992)

Essays and short stories

This list is not exhaustive.

• "All Patients are Refugees" (Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies, edited by Sayantani Das Gupta and Marsha Hurst, The Kent State University Press, 2007)
• "Baghdad/Belgrade Correspondence" (Writing the World: On Globalization, editors Wandee Pryor and Rothenberg, MIT Press, Boston Massachusetts 2005)
• "Letter to My Imaginary American Friend" (Stop the Next War, editors Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, Inner Ocean, San Francisco, California 2005)
• "We Are All Women In Black" (Women on War, edited by Daniela Gioseffi, Feminist Press, New York, New York, 2003)
• "Mermaids, Ljubica" (short stories) (Casablanca Serbia, editor Nicole Janigro, Feltrinelli, Milan, Italy 2003)
• The Diary of a Political Idiot (Granta 67, Autumn, London, UK 1999)
• "Lies and Secrets" (Index on Censorship, London, UK 1999)
• Many short essays published on the blog Boing Boing, including "The Long Goodbye", concerning the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic
• "Ja i moja multikulturalna ulica" (Feminist 94, Belgrade, 2001; translated into English as "Me and my multicultural street" in Bojana Kovačević’s Master's thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació, Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2008)
• Other writings for newspapers and TV including Serbian weekly NIN; Serbian daily Nasa Borba; The Washington Post; Philadelphia Inquirer; L'Espresso; Panorama; ABC TV; El Pais; Al Jazeera; Flair; Grazia. She has a column in La Stampa, Italy, "I Globalisti" (together with her husband Bruce Sterling) and Yellow Cab, Belgrade, Boing Boing.

Films

• Difficile Morire, artistic collaboration on Umberto Silva's film, (Rome 1977)
• Mother and Sinner, with Rade Vladic (Belgrade 1978)
• Morning Midday Evening, with Rade Vladic, film based on a short story by David Albahari (Belgrade 1978)
• Nefertiti Was Here (Belgrade 1978)
• Nefertiti Was Here in Belgrade (Belgrade 2003)
• Jasmina's Diary, with Dinko Tucakovic (Belgrade 1999)
• Stencil Art in Serbia (Belgrade 2007)
• A Minute to Twelve (Belgrade 2007)
• Invisible Cities (Belgrade 2008)
• Rafts (Belgrade 2008)
• Participation (Belgrade 2008)
• Blogs (Belgrade 2008)
• Recycling Romany (Belgrade 2008)

External links

• Jasmina Tesanovic weblog on b92
• Source for this article
• Women in Black (international) website
• Code Pink
• Nefertiti Was Here
• Interview w. Jasmina Tesanovic
• Serbian elections according to Jasmina Tešanovic (interview)
• Jasmina Tesanovic's speech at LIFT Conference 2008 (English)
• Jasmina Tesanovic personal weblog.