Vesna Pavlović

Professor of Art; Department Chair
Paul E. Shwab Chair in Fine Arts

Vesna Pavlović is the Paul E. Shwab Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She received her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2007, and BA in Cinematography at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade in 2002. In the 1990s, in Belgrade, Pavlović worked closely with feminist pacifist group Women in Black. Her photographs and artwork engage contemporary art’s defining critical questions. Throughout her career, this has included the relationship between film and photography, new modes of documentary practice, photography's expanded field, obsolete technologies and the changing role of images in contemporary digital culture, and the archive as an artistic medium. Pavlović’s cinematography studies at the University of Belgrade in the 1990s—where she was the first female graduate—fundamentally shaped her photographic practice, attuning her to the connection between film and photography. Subsequently, she worked as a photojournalist in Belgrade where she witnessed her country's dissolution during a tumultuous era of war and political unrest. This formative experience anchored her artistic practice in a documentary style and methodology that remains central to her work.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2024 NEA Art Projects Award, 2022 Tennessee Arts Commission Arts Access Grant, 2021 Current Art Fund Grant, 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 2018 Fulbright Scholar Award, 2017 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation grant, and Art Matters Foundation grant in 2012. Pavlović exhibited widely, including solo shows at the EADJ engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice Begonia Labs and Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, the Collection in Washington DC, Museum of History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. She participated in a number of group shows, including the Museum of Women in the Arts and the Hirshhorn Museum and the Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, USA; The Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon, France; the Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, Turkey; MAC – Metropolitan Arts Center, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Württembergischen Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, Germany; 13th Havana Biennial Rios Intermitentes Project, Matanzas, Cuba; KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; Zachęta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; New Art Gallery Walsall, UK; Bucharest Biennale 5, Romania; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA; NGBK, Berlin, Germany; and Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK. Recent publications include Prefabricating Solidarity: IMS Žeželj Between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Angola (Museum of African Art, Belgrade), Vesna Pavlović, Stagecraft (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive (Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2018).

@studio_vesnapavlovic

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