AICA International and the Archives de la Critique d'art are very happy to announce that Dejan Vasić is the second recipient of the research grant focusing on the history of AICA and its various national sections, established by AICA and the ACAs in 2025. Dejan Vasić's project aims to trace the history of AICA's activities in Yugoslavia, from the founding of the section in 1956 to its dissolution during the Yugoslav Wars.
Dejan Vasić (b. 1985, Šabac, Yugoslavia) is an art historian and curator of late modern and contemporary art and moving image media. He specializes in transnational avant-garde and conceptual art, concentrating primarily on performance, video art, photography, and artists’ films and media works. His research intersects art, power, war, and everyday life, with methodological grounding in historical materialism, memory politics, decolonial, gender and feminist theory, and an affirmation of critical thinking as a public good. Dejan is passionate about the history of exhibitions, museology, and curatorial practice; he is invested in first-person writing, and frequently collaborates with artists who battle social, economic, and political problems.
Dejan holds a BA and an MA in Art History from the University of Belgrade and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. In the 2025/26 academic year, he serves as a student co-chair of the Stanford Humanities Center’s research workshop, American Studies from the Inside Out, which challenges the traditionally national focus and boundaries of American Studies by addressing questions of migration, dissidence, outsiderness, and activism, both historically and in the present. Dejan was a co-curator of the exhibition An Expanded Lens, which marked the tenth anniversary of the Anderson Collection at Stanford (2024/25).
Dejan has over a decade of professional experience in Serbia and the former Yugoslav region, where he has been involved in radical curatorial practices and critical writing addressing the politics and ethics of aesthetics. Since 2012, he has been a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and served on the Program Advisory Board of AICA Serbia (2020–2023). He curated the visual arts program at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (2017–2023), co-edited Beton: Cultural Propaganda Kit (2018–2023), and was a member of the Four Faces of Omarska Working Group (2010–2015), the Culture of Memory curatorial platform (2010–2014), and the Kontekst Collective (2009–2013).