Helena Bulaja was born in Split, Croatia in 1971, and was educated in History of Art and Comparative Literature at Zagreb University.
She worked as an art director, designer and illustrators for various computer magazines, and started to work as a digital artist in 1995. In 1996 on Salon of the Young Artists in Zagreb, together with Petar Grimani and Zvonimir Bulaja, she exhibited the first interactive Internet installation in Croatia entitled "...lOok ... wwwsculpture ... Freedom In The City or Just an Illusion". Web pages of the project were recommended at Geocities.com, Hotwired.com etc. In 1997 the project continued on the Salon of Architecture in Zagreb, where she made an installation ..."lOok"...WWWSCULPTURE ... introducing real space to cyberspace and vice versa - METAPHORS", experimenting with telepresence and urban space improvement with the use of the new technologies. Web pages of the project were presented at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, in Net Art selection.
In 1999, with her husband Zvonimir she founded a publishing company 'Alt F4 - Bulaja naklada', which became the leading Croatian multimedia and CD-ROM publisher. The company had its first success with the edition "Classics of Croatian Literature", a collection of Croatian literature classics in e-book form. The CDs are still national bestsellers.
In 2000, she started the most successful Croatian interactive animation project: "Croatian Tales of Long Ago", based on a fairytale book written in 1916 by Ivana Brlić Mažuranić.
The project won lots of international awards and recognitions, at the animation and new media festivals worldwide (San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro Montreux, Toronto, Austin, Zagreb, Annecy, Hamburg, Ottawa, Seoul...). Helena gathered together teams from the USA, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, England, Denmark and Croatia, and each team transferred one of eight fairytales from this famous book into the digital world, with the complete creative freedom. There were more than a hundred people involved in this project: animators, illustrators, musicians, programmers etc. CD-ROMs "Croatian Tales" was selected to be the most important project in Croatian animation and cinematography of the decade by the leading Croatian media.
Helena is now working on her newest project, experimental interactive film inspired with the scientist Nikola Tesla.
Helena lives in Zagreb and is a mother of 4 children.
