Jadranka Važanová is currently on the board of directors for the Vilcek Foundation and serves as a member of the programs advisory committee, where she works to provide insight and perspectives on the foundation’s prizes programs and other initiatives.

Važanová has been a long-time friend of the Vilcek Foundation and an avid supporter of its mission. In 2009 she curated the first live performance program hosted at the foundation, Peter Breiner: enTANGOed.

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, as a recipient of the Österreichischer Austauschdienst (ÖAD) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarships, she continued her research studies at the Universität Wien in Vienna, Austria, and 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 and Slovakia, 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 —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—has been widely published. Jadranka lectured on Slovak traditional music in Zagreb, Vienna, and Berlin, and taught world music classes at Hunter College.