Ana Croegaert is a Chicago-based anthropologist working with ethnography, performance, and artmaking to expand awareness of people’s creative efforts to deal with the aftermath of harm and to craft hopeful futures.

Ana is the author of Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies (2022), a journey covering nearly three decades of political and economic ruptures in the lives of Bosnian women refugees of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. The book draws on critical approaches to ethnography, performance, and refugee studies in order to illustrate the constraints women have contended with in their efforts to remake their lives, and shows that they insist on understanding their wartime losses as simultaneously social and material.

Ana’s ongoing research and teaching interests include a focus on food, urban place-making, and wellbeing in Chicago’s north side refugee corridor, post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, and post-Katrina New Orleans. You can read her essay about the social practice artwork Solitary Gardens here, a book chapter about the social work of Bosnian coffee practices here, and a co-authored essay about making the Field Museum’s Pandemic Collection here.

Ana has held academic appointments at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of New Orleans, and is a research associate at the Field Museum. She has curated programs for the Field Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and has longstanding relationships with the social sculpture projects Solitary Gardens, led by artist jackie sumell, and ŠTO TE NEMA, led by artist Aida Šehović.

Ana is a girl from the middle: She has great affection for the Mississippi River (she was born at its head and lived for some years at its mouth) but her heart is at the southern tip of its longtime sister, Lake Michigan, in metro-Chicago, where she grew up and raised her son.