Bio

Milana Vujkov

All I wanted to be at the age of nine was a secret agent. I did extensive research for my chosen vocation – artistic, academic, shamanic & otherwise. Born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, childhood in Tehran, Iran, attended a sunny American school. Back in socialism, I became an intense teen on a bike, into alchemy, cinema & conspiracies.

Then, I started dating, which derailed my spooky career. The war, inevitably, restored it. Chaos and heartbreak made existence wretched for everyone, yet ephemeral and surreal. That worked as relief. Graduated in psychology at University Of Novi Sad, MA in history of film & visual media at Birkbeck in London, my tutor was Prof. Laura Mulvey (feminist icon), in the meantime, moved countries and relationships, waited tables/tended bars, made idiosyncratic shorts, wrote (mostly) unproduced scripts, phantasmagorical short stories & copious amounts of poetry. Had profound fun with friends. Along the bumpy road, contributed to a magazine & newspaper, worked as an arts correspondent for national TV, manufactured film theory, presented at film conferences, attempted an esoteric PhD on the moving image, translated books, curated & organised events, like film seasons, poetry jams, stand-up, and such – somehow joining the film industry proper, promoting indie, art house & quality docs in London, for years.

Always travelling, soothsaying my way through cosmologies & tribes, I was lucky to learn beautiful mysterious things from extraordinary people. Figured out the secret agency, in time.

Presently, author of two blogs Poets, Mavericks & Prophets and Lola On Film, researching psychology of art and creativity, cinema and spectatorship, the female gaze, archetypal enchantment, consciousness and culture.
In my artistic work, I examine the oracular nature of storytelling, fusing poetic art and alchemical principles in various types of media. I am also the host of Lola & The Poets Podcast on magical realities, and run an art
Story Shop. Planning to launch art & alchemy Workshops sometime in the near future — when the celestial weather allows. In the longer process of writing an esoteric novel & shooting a doc about female ancestry. Serbia/UK

You can check out my film work and writing – filmology, film theory, reviews & essays, at Lola On Film. For what it is worth, I am a Tomatometer-Approved Critic and you can find snippets of my reviews there.

If you like my alchemical psychological work, I most suggest you follow Lola & The Poets Podcast, a virtual alchemical workshop, exploring personal and collective magical journeys, the ways the mystical & the mundane are intertwined. Solo shows, interviews. Out every odd Thursday. You can find Lola & The Poets also Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts.

My academic work lives in a few places, but it is all assembled at milanavujkov.academia.edu

To contact me, please drop me a line at milana@poets-mavericks-and-prophets.com or on one of the platforms below:

Instagram: Poets, Mavericks & Prophets

Twitter: Lola On Film

YouTube: Lola & The Poets

ACADEMIC REFERENCES AND CERTIFICATES:

Certified Transactional Analysis Practitioner, TA Centre, Novi Sad, 1996. Graduated in Psychology (BA with Honours), Faculty Of Philosophy, University Of Novi Sad, 1997. MA in History Of Film & Visual Media, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College, University Of London, 2005. Around 600 hours of theoretical & practical work, as well as workshops, at the Serbian Society For Integrative Art Psychotherapy (IAP), Novi Sad/Belgrade (2010-2018). I also attended workshops & courses in psychodrama, fine arts, dramatic arts, dance therapy, astrology, and various hermetica.

POETRY, FICTION, SCREENPLAYS:

2020 Milana Vujkov, Keyhole Elijah (novel, in progress). 2003 Milana Vujkov, Lunatics At Large (screenplay, unproduced). 1999 Milana Vujkov, Sugar Serendip (screenplay, unproduced). 1996 Milana Vujkov, The Shelter (screenplay, produced). 1996 Milana Vujkov, The Journey, NS ART, Novi Sad (book of poetry, published, part of a multimedia project with Katarina Kovač, musician and Darko Vuković, designer).

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY:

2021 Rosevine (in production). Serbia. TBC mins. 2010 Katarina Kovač: High & Low. Serbia. 3 mins. 2009 The Treasure Of Nina Madre. UK. 29 mins. 2009 Sanya Budna & Before. Serbia/Montenegro. 113 mins. 2009 Katarina Kovač: Streets Of Mine. Serbia. 4 mins. 2008 The New York Cube And The Hand of God. UK. 9 mins. Streetwise. UK. 5 mins. 2004 The Year Of The Monkey. UK. 10 mins. 1996 The Shelter. Serbia. 26 mins.

TRANSLATIONS:

2022 The Museum of the Serbian Orthodox Church – Catalogue (The Museum of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Belgrade, 2023), 2020-21 Albert Einstein (ed. Ze’ev Rosenkranz), The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein (Akademska knjiga, Novi Sad, 2023). 2019 Spiritual and Cultural Heritage of the Monastery of Studenica: Past, Perseverance, Contemporaneity (exhibition catalogue, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, SANU, 2019). 2017 Marsela Šunjić, Greetings From The Moon, novel (Dobra knjiga, Sarajevo, 2019). 2016 Translation: Marsela Šunjić, Good Night, City, novel (Dobra knjiga, Sarajevo, 2019). 2016 Suzana Vuksanović, Kristian Lukić, Čedomir Janičić, Dragan Rakić, Jedan One, Uno, Ein, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2015 Suzana Vuksanović, Rastislav Škulec | Remix. Refresh. Restart. MSUV, Novi Sad. 2015 Svetlana Mladenov, Conflicts, provocations, relations, challenges, fears, energies, determinations: Art in the expanded field. MSUV, Novi Sad. 2015 Svetlana Mladenov, Subdued Existence, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2014 Sanja Kojić Mladenov, Cargo East, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2013 Nebojša Milenković, Uroš Đurić, Strategies of Excess, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2013 Suzana Vuksanović, New Sculpture In Vojvodina, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2013 Bosniaks of Sandzak, monograph, Beoknjiga, Belgrade. 2012 Suzana Vuksanović, Mira Brtka: Unstable Balances, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2011 Serbian Pavilion Catalogue for the 54th Venice Biennale, MSUV, Novi Sad. 2010 Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, Akademska knjiga, Novi Sad.

CURATORIAL WORK:

2005 Programme for No Exit: Essential Serbian Cinema, 1995-2000 a film season I curated & organised at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA Cinemas 1 & 2), 4-16 November 2005.

more on no exit

FILM THEORY

2024 Patterns of Miscommunication in Contemporary East-Central European Cinema (Editors: Denisa-Adriana Oprea, Liri-Alienor Chapelan. National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA). COMUNICARE.RO. Romania. 2024)

If you’d like to check out my old PhD proposal (Goldsmiths, June 2009), it lives here: Film, the Alchemical Medium: Archetypal Enchantment and the Transformative Potential of the Moving Image (2009). It aimed to study how we are enchanted by film, using early film theory, post-Jungian analysis & anthropology of ritual, and ways the moving image can potentially be utilised in art therapy. You are also welcome to read up its theoretical descendants, The Alchemical Screen: Enchantment and the Cinema, my symposium paper & presentation at the 21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture symposium, Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on immersion in narratives — the cinema and the body, June 2023. Also an earlier paper, Archetypal Enchantment and the Twin of David Lynch, a presentation I gave at the Cinematic Desire: A Cinema Studies Group interdisciplinary graduate conference, CUNY Graduate Centre, New York, March 2010, on film recording as a replica of life, its twin and its double, its deathly echo, and the theme of the doppelgänger in the cinema of David Lynch. Revised & edited, August 2020. For a bit more back to the future vibe, I’ve edited and revised Fallen Women of Hollywood Melodrama: 1930s-1950s, my 2005 Birkbeck final essay for Prof Laura Mulvey’s course on melodrama, exploring the myth of the fallen woman in classic Hollywood melodrama, via Jungian framework, tracing historical, religious and literary antecedents, delving into the archetypal realms of the dark, wild feminine projected onto the screen, and her impact on the spectator, male and female. Its theoretical follow-up, From Door Frame to Freeze Frame: Femmes Ante Portas was presented at Framed: Delimiting the Film Image: A Cinema Studies Group interdisciplinary graduate conference, New York, April 2008. A post-Jungian reading, it aimed at analysis of the veneration of the Hollywood film icon, tracing the blazing trail of cinema femme fatales, their imagery framed within portals, places where darkness and light meet, transforming, dynamically, into a new animus/anima fluid form of the femme fatale as action figure.

MA Dissertation

Black Humour in Serbian Films of the Early Eighties and Its Cultural Consequences: The Cinema of Slobodan Šijan and Dušan Kovačević – examining the dark heart of laughter and the symbiotic relationship film has with its audiences, how it wires us to think and talk in certain ways, its cultural impact, and its myriad semiotic and cinematic legacies – a bungy jump into the Serbian (and YU) 1980s cinema scene, specifically, four films, and two filmmakers. MA Dissertation. School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London, October 2005. Tutor: Prof. Laura Mulvey.

OTHERS MY WORK: CITATIONS

Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia by Janjira Sombatpoonsiri.

Urban life styles and media representation of urban life and youth culture: The subculture of ‘Silicone valley’ and film trilogy of Radivoje Raša Andrić by Ivana Kronja.

Cinematic representations of nationalist-religious ideology in Serbian films during the 1990s by Milja Radović.

Folding cubanidad : a Deleuzian approach to contemporary Cuban cinema by Paola Monaldi.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

For some of my other work in film theory – please see on Scribd:

The Magic of Joy: Cinema of Emir Kusturica, From Realism to Magical Reality
Essay, 2004, European Cinema, Birkbeck College, University of London.

OLD PODCASTS:

You can hear me talking film & film culture at length with the rebel crew of Free Seed Films on Soho Radio – while I was with Picturehouse Cinemas:

Poets, Mavericks & Prophets site image: ©Abstract colorful flame patterns on white background, by modify260, Adobe Stock Standard Licence. 🧿