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Vesna Jurca Tadel

Theatre director

Vesna Jurca Tadel is a dramaturg, critic, essayist and translator.

After graduating in dramaturgy from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana, she worked as a dramaturg at the Ljubljana City Theatre, where she was acting artistic director from 1991 to 1993. Her repertoire curation was widely hailed as innovative and communicative, especially due to the interplay of established Slovenian theatre-makers with international artists, as well as due to staging Slovenian new plays and the involvement of the youngest generation of actors. From 1985 to 1994 she worked as a practising dramaturg in most of Slovenia’s professional theatres, including the SNT Drama Ljubljana on several occasions.

From 1995 to 2022, she was employed at the Ministry of Culture, where from 2013 she was responsible for the field of theatre and headed the Arts Sector.
During her studies, she started writing theatre and literary criticism. In 1999, she covered productions of Slovenian plays in all Slovenian professional theatres for the magazine Sodobnost, and from 2003 to 2011 she wrote for the Theatre Diary column. From 2003 to 2006, she reviewed the SNT Drama Ljubljana productions for the daily Delo, and in the 2006/2007 season she wrote essays on theatre for the magazine Ampak in the column All the World’s a Stage. From 2010 to 2013 she was a theatre reviewer for the fortnightly magazine Pogledi.

A selection of her reviews entitled Why Then? and subtitled Performances of Slovenian Plays and Stage Adaptations (From the 1999/2000 season to the 2012/2013 Season, Sodobnost, Ampak, Delo, Pogledi) was published in 2020 in the Documents of the Slovenian Theatre Institute series.

In 2007, she chaired the jury of the national Maribor Theatre Festival Borštnikovo srečanje, from 2007 to 2011 she was a jury member of the Delo daily Kresnik Award for the best Slovenian novel.

She is also involved in translation and has translated several Slovenian plays into English.

Her tenet in the artistic direction of the SNT Drama Ljubljana is to stage classical works, to stage works by Slovenian authors, to stage the most exciting and relevant contemporary foreign works, and to recruit excellent collaborators.