Tena Štivičić

Tena Štivičić graduated from the Academy of Drama Art, Department of Dramaturgy, Zagreb and obtained a Masters Degree in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Tena’s first play was the award-winning Can't Escape Sundays. Written during her third year at the Academy, it was produced at Zagreb’s internationally renowned ZKM Theatre. Following numerous stage and radio productions and publications in various European countries, it remains one of her most produced plays to this day.

The Two of Us, the play with which she graduated from the Academy, was first produced in 2003 at the legendary Atelje 212 Theatre, Belgrade. It was the first new Croatian play to be performed on a Belgrade stage since the break-up of Yugoslavia. This hit production won The Audience Award at the Marulićevi dani Festival in Split, Croatia, and the play received several other publications and productions, including one staged at the National Theatre in Zagreb.

Inspired by her first year living in London, Tena wrote the acclaimed play Fragile! The play follows the lives of a group of entirely foreign and immigrant London residents, trying to make it in the metropolis. It was first produced at Mladinsko Gledališče in Slovenia, and was voted best production of the year, receiving critical acclaim around Europe. Fragile! enjoyed further productions at London’s Arcola Theatre, on BBC Radio 4, and a number of stage and radio productions performed around Europe. It won numerous awards, including best European Play and Innovations Award at Heidelberg Stückemarkt in Germany in 2008.

As part of The 50 – a Royal Court Theatre and BBC initiative to mark the 50th anniversary of The Royal Court Theatre, Tena was nominated as one of the fifty most promising young writers in Great Britain.

Her next play, Fireflies, was developed at the National Theatre Studio and premiered at the ZKM Theatre. This award-winning production opened the Neue Stücke aus Europa festival in Wiesbaden in 2008. The play was produced in several countries and translated and published in a number of languages, including a publication in the reputable Theater Heute. Subsequently, Tena served as the Croatian patron at Neue Stücke aus Europa Festival, Wiesbaden.

Over the years, she has taken part in several multi-national, multi-authored projects. Goldoni Terminus co-written with Rui Zink and Eduardo Erba for the 2007 Venice Biennale, celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carlo Goldoni. Seven Days in Zagreb was written for the European Theatre Convention project, The Orient Express, in 2009. In 2013, she co-wrote Europa, with Steve Waters, Malgorzata Sikorska Miszczuk and Lutz Hübner, produced by the Birmingham REP, ZKM, Teatr Polski and Dresden Staatstheater.

Her 2011 play, Invisible, commissioned by Transport and The New Wolsey Theatre, toured England in 2011 and 2012.

Her play Three Winters, tracing the journey of a Zagreb family across four generations and through the turbulent twentieth century Croatia opened to great critical acclaim at the National Theatre in London in 2014. It was directed by the renowned director Howard Davies and won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for 2015. It went on to have numerous productions across the world, including a long running, best-selling production at the Croatian National Theatre, an award winning production at the Bungakuza Theatre in Japan and a 2023.production at the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna.

Her play 64 Shots, which investigates the pressures put on a modern relationship by infertility and IVF treatments, opened to great reviews at the Belgrade Atelje 212 in 2021., followed by further productions in Croatia, Bulgaria and Slovenia.

She wrote Cabaret Caspar for the Slovenian Drama Theatre in 2022.

Tena is currently under commission by the Berliner Ensemble.

She is also developing two feature film projects, a screenplay Mum, Dad and Me with Antitalent in Croatia and Acid with Screen Scotland in the UK.

Her work as a dramaturg includes Closer by Patrick Marber at the Gavella Theatre; The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute, Mala Scena; The Ressistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht, Ulysses Theatre; and the ballet, Puss in Boots, National Theatre, Croatia.

As dramaturg and editor, she has twice collaborated with her father, Ivo Štivičić, on his play The Drunken Night of 1918, adapted from Miroslav Krleža; and his original play, Shakespeare in the Kremlin, which premiered at Ulysses Theatre in the summer of 2013.

Tena has been writing a column in the Croatian magazine Zaposlena since 2003. The column has evolved into a diary of sorts, charting some personal – and many societal – events, changes and phenomena over the course of the past two decades. The collected columns were published in three books, which topped the non-fiction charts in Croatia.