Jadranka Važanová is a member of the programs advisory committee of the Vilcek Foundation. In this capacity, Važanová works alongside other committee members to provide insight and perspectives on the foundation’s prizes programs and other initiatives.

An accomplished ethnomusicologist and music scholar, Važanová is a product development coordinator and supervising editor at the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), a nonprofit organization founded at the Graduate Center of CUNY in 1966 to document and preserve knowledge about all musical traditions, and to disseminate this knowledge worldwide via digital collections and advanced tools. RILM is an international collaboration based on the UNESCO model, accredited as an NGO to provide advisory services to UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. 

Over the past two decades, Važanová has worked with RILM in a variety of editorial and managerial roles, lending her expertise in music scholarship and her knowledge of Slavic languages to support their mission; writing, editing, and indexing bibliographic records and abstracts of music literature; overseeing the processing and editorial treatment of fulltext collection of nearly 300 periodicals; and coordinating RILM’s collaboration with a global network of national committees. 

Važanová was a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD), and she has been representing RILM at the conferences of the Music Library Association (MLA) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centers (IAML).

Važanová earned her MA in Musicology and Aesthetics at the Univerzita Komenského, in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1992. Subsequently, she was awarded the Österreichischer Austauschdienst (ÖAD) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarships for a one-year musicology study at the Universität Wien in Vienna, Austria, and for a one-year research at the International Institute for Traditional Music in Berlin, Germany. Jadranka’s collaboration with Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv led to the development of her fieldwork and dissertation research in Croatia, which she continued as a doctoral student in the United States. 

She completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center of CUNY in 2008. Her research studies—focused on the music of ethnic groups, transformational processes in musical cultures of Europe, wedding traditions of Slavic people, and the music of Slovak Americans in New York City—have been widely published. Jadranka lectured on Slovak traditional music in Zagreb, Vienna, and Berlin, and taught world music classes at Hunter College.