A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Mirjana Joković

Mirjana Joković (Serbian Cyrillic: Мирјана Јоковић) (born November 24, 1967) is a Serbian film and stage actress, best known for her role as Natalija Zovkov in Underground, the film of Emir Kusturica (1995). She currently is Director of Performance for Acting and an acting teacher in the Theater Faculty of the California Institute of the Arts near Los Angeles.

Mirjana Jokovic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She spent her early years in Zambia, where her father was an industrial engineer.

.

She was graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and began to perform at the National Theater and the Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade and in films and television. She was a regular character in the popular Yugoslav television series "Grey Home", and in 1988 she was named Best Leading Actress at the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival and Best International Actress at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.

In 1989, she played the lead in the German film "Serbian Girl" directed by Peter Sehr, then she starred with Daniel Day Lewis in "Eversmile, New Jersey" directed by Carlos Sorin and won best actress for San Sebastián International Film Festival. In 1993 she moved to the United States, but she continued to make films in Serbia. She starred in "Vukovar" (1994) which earned her the Yugoslav Best Actress Award. In 1995 she played the female lead in the film "Underground", directed by Emir Kusturica, which won the Palme d'Or for best film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 and the New York Critics Circle Award for best foreign film. She also made "Three Summer Days" (1997), for which she received another Yugoslav Best Actress Award, and Cabaret Balkan, which won a Special Venice Film Festival Award in 1999.

She moved to the United States in 1993 and began a new career in American theater, appearing in the off-Broadway production of "Mud, River Stone" by Lynn Nottage at the Playwrights Horizon Theater. She also appeared in the chorus and as Chrsitothemys in the Broadway production of "Electra" directed by David Leveaux.

From 1997 through 2001 she worked at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her roles at ART included Dulle Griet in "Full Circle" by Chuck Mee, Hermione in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale", Desdemona in "Othello", the part of Natasha/Olga Knipper in "Three Farces and a Funeral" by Robert Brustein, and "Mother Courage and Her Children" by Bertolt Brecht.

In 2003 she played in "Romeo and Juliet", directed by Emily Mann, at the McCarter Theater and made the film "A Better Way to Die" directed by Scott Wiper for HBO. She also starred Off-Broadway in "Necessary Targets" by Eve Ensler, "Electra" by Sophocles at the Hartford Stage, and "Three Sisters" by Anton Chekhov at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

After her starring role in "Underground", she appeared in several European and American films. She played the part of Elena Iscovescu in "Side Streets", (CargoFilms/nuMedien) in 1998; the part of Adrijana, in "Strsljen" (also known as The Hornet, Le frelon, and Grenxa) (Cinema Design Belgrade) in 1998; the part of Ana in "Bure baruta" (also known as Cabaret Balkan, The Powder Keg, and Baril de poudre) (Paramount Pictures) in 1998; the part of a hotel maid in "Maid in Manhattan" (Columbia Pictures) in 2002; and as Tess in "Private Property" (Chiaroscuro Pictures) in 2002.

In 200- she began to teach in the Theater Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

In April 2010 she helped organize the first theater workshop via Internet between CalArts and the Moscow Art Theater School in Moscow, under the auspices of the Binational Presidential Commission created by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. In June 2010 she was invited to come to Moscow by the U.S. Embassy as the first Binational Presidential Commission cultural envoy to stimulate new exchanges with Moscow theaters and theater schools.

Wikipedia


SA

 

People Directory

Andrei Simic

Education:

  • Ph.D. Social Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1970

Academic Employment:

  • Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California, 1991

Description of Research:
Summary Statement of Research Interests

  • Professor Simic studies the ethnography of Europe, with a focus on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. His research centers on ethnicity, nationalism, and post-Communist society with particular emphasis on former Yugoslavia. His other specialties include the study of American ethnic groups, cross-cultural gerontology, and visual anthropology.

Research Keywords

  • Balkans and Eastern Europe, Ethnicity, Nationalism, Post-Communist Society, Cross-cultural Gerontology, Visual Anthropology
.
Read more ...

Publishing

On Divine Philanthropy

From Plato to John Chrysostom

by Bishop Danilo Krstic

This book describes the use of the notion of divine philanthropy from its first appearance in Aeschylos and Plato to the highly polyvalent use of it by John Chrysostom. Each page is marked by meticulous scholarship and great insight, lucidity of thought and expression. Bishop Danilo’s principal methodology in examining Chrysostom is a philological analysis of his works in order to grasp all the semantic shades of the concept of philanthropia throughout his vast literary output. The author overviews the observable development of the concept of philanthropia in a research that encompasses nearly seven centuries of literary sources. Peculiar theological connotations are studied in the uses of divine philanthropia both in the classical development from Aeschylos via Plutarch down to Libanius, Themistius of Byzantium and the Emperor Julian, as well as in the biblical development, especially from Philo and the New Testament through Origen and the Cappadocians to Chrysostom.

With this book, the author invites us to re-read Chrysostom’s golden pages on the ineffable philanthropy of God. "There is a modern ring in Chrysostom’s attempt to prove that we are loved—no matter who and where we are—and even infinitely loved, since our Friend and Lover is the infinite Triune God."

The victory of Chrysostom’s use of philanthropia meant the affirmation of ecclesial culture even at the level of Graeco-Roman culture. May we witness the same reality today in the modern techno-scientific world in which we live.