Biography
Mila Turajlić is a filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works draw on a combination of oral histories, documentary archives, fiction films and found footage to fabricate a new reflexive language that confronts memory and ruins with the disappearing narratives of history.
She teaches documentary filmmaking and creative archive use at SciencesPo and INASup in Paris as well as various documentary programmes (EURODOC, Balkan Documentary Center, Scottish Documentary Institute) and has been a guest lecturer at universities (Sorbonne, Harvard, Stanford).
Her award-winning documentaries Cinema Komunisto and The Other Side of Everything have been featured in numerous film festivals, including Toronto and Tribeca, and screened in cinemas in Europe and the United States. In 2018, she was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create a series of archive-based video installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels was selected for the 2022 Berlin Biennale.
Turajlić has received grants from the Serbian Film Center; CNC-Cinémas du monde, France; EURIMAGES; Doha Film Institute; and Jan Vrijman Fund, the Netherlands. She is an alumnus of Archidoc, Documentary Campus, IDFAcademy and EURODOC. In 2020, Turajlić was a Chicken&Egg Award grantee and invited to join the AMPAS (Oscars) Documentary Branch. She is a 2021 TED Fellow and currently a Fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas & Imagination.
Turajlić holds a BA in Film and TV Production from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade (2002); a BSc (First) in Politics and International Relations and an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics (2003 and 2004, respectively); and a PhD from the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster (2015).
Born in Belgrade in 1979, Turajlić currently lives and works between Belgrade and Paris.