Helena Bulaja

Helena Bulaja
Helena Bulaja in her film "Mechanical Figures" (2006)
Born	Helena Madunić (1971-12-06) 6 December 1971 (age 45) Split, Croatia
Occupation	Director, multimedia artist, animator, designer, producer, screenwriter
Years active	1995–present
Works	Regoch, Mehanical Figures, "The Cat Time Stories"
Website	http://www.helenabulaja.net/ http://www.bulaja.com/

Helena Bulaja (pronounced [buˈlaja]; born 6 December 1971) is a Croatian multimedia artist, film director, scriptwriter, designer and film producer.

Helena Bulaja was born in Split, Croatia. She was educated in art history and comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. She lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

Bulaja is active in digital art, design, art and film since 1994. In the early days of her career she worked as art director, designer and illustrator in several Croatian computer magazines (Computerworld Croatia, Net, Vidi), and in 1995 she started her digital artist career. In 1990s her interactive art projects, mostly occupied with metaphors, tele-presence and relation of the real world and cyber-space, were featured in magazines such as Hotwired, and presented at Ars Electronica arts and technology festival's Net Art selection in Linz, Austria in 1997.

In 2000 Helena Bulaja started an animated and interactive adaptation of fairytales from the book Priče iz davnine (Croatian Tales of Long Ago) written by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, a Croatian writer for children ("the Slavic Tolkien"), and based on the Slavic mythology. Bulaja was the originator, editor-in-chief, manager, director and designer of the project. The project was presented at more than 30 international conferences and festivals dedicated to the interactive media, animation and film, and won several awards, including FlashForward Festival 2002 in San Francisco (category story), best multimedia award at Lucca Comics and Games in 2004, at International Family Film Festival in 2007 in Hollywood, and Zagreb City Award. The interactive animated project Croatian Tales of Long Ago was a new step in exploring the relation of the digital media and classical literature and was created by eight independent teams authors from all around the world (Australia, Germany, France, USA, Canada, England, Scotland...), whose work was coordinated on the Internet. Some of the animators, directors, musicians and other authors that contributed to the project are Nathan Jurevicius, Christian Biegai, Alistair Keddie, Laurence Arcadias, Ellen McAuslan, Mirek and Paulina Nisenbaum, Sabina Hahn, Edgar Beals, Katrin Rothe, Brenda Hutchinson, Leon Lučev, Sabina Hahn, Erik Adigard and many others. Each of eight teams transferred one of the eight fairy tales from the original Brlić's book to the digital media, with the complete artistic and creative freedom.