It is with great pleasure and immense pride that we announce that Tina Vrbnjak, a leading actress at the SNT Drama Ljubljana, is this year’s recipient of the Prešeren Fund Prize for Performing Arts. Dear Tina, our heartfelt congratulations!
“Tina Vrbnjak has long been a reliable and consistently professional presence within the SNT Drama Ljubljana ensemble. In the past three years she has fully developed her distinctly contemporary theatrical voice and created a remarkable series of superb, diverse and distinctly recognizable roles that reveal her as a mature artist with extraordinary range and well-thought-out creative engagement. Vrbnjak is a theatre artist of a special kind: not a mere performing artist, but a true co-creator and co-author of performances. With flawless diction, musical phrasing, incisive acting expression and precise physical control, she moves effortlessly between dramatic and performative registers, shaping the meaning of productions at the SNT Drama Ljubljana with exceptional responsibility and insight.
In the original project Alice: Some Solilogues on the Unbearableness of Time, she served as co-author of the text and the driving creative force behind the performance, using humour, irony, and self-irony to craft a cohesive poetic reflection on time, identity, and her profession. In The Mrakiad, in an apparently minimal, non-verbal situation, featuring the head of the family’s first wife, she created an emblematic scene in which a repeated fall down the stairs becomes a metaphor for guilt, inheritance, and the disintegration of community. With an exceptionally precise presence “oscillating between the living and the dead,” she cut a scene that, despite its sparse starting point, resonated powerfully throughout the performance with a powerfully dramaturgical impact.
In The Doctor, Vrbnjak reveals yet another facet of her artistic maturity: from a nearly wordless presence, she sculpts a confident, thoughtful micro-role as an intern, and later becomes a decisive, articulate advocate of contemporary ideologies. In The Great Dictator (Hannah), she moves lithely between burlesque and lyricism, combining spoking dialogues and pantomime with expressive facial work, witty gestures, and precise movement. In the documentary naturalism of How a Tree Fell (Anita), she unites vocal discipline with the ensemble’s collective rhythm, where the most intimate confrontations and group moments function as a single orchestral whole. In The Day I Was No Longer Me (Woman 2), she conveys duality with vivid, passionate, and playfully dynamic energy. What is more, her interpretations of canonical roles are bold and compelling, confronting female characters, written in periods marked by dominant patriarchy, with a delicately reflected, contemporary perspective. Be it Viola in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Helena in Cankar’s For the Good of the Nation, or Roxana in Cyrano, she always creates richly multilayered characters.
Across all these productions, Vrbnjak’s work ethic shines through: not only does she help shape directorial concepts, but crafts detailed acting scores, brings canonical characters into the present moment, and takes deep responsibility for her fellow actors, the text, and the audience through her pensive, expressive bodily presence.
— From the Prešeren Fund Award jury statement
