Sanja Jurca Avci is an architect who fell in love with storytelling.

As a student of architecture Sanja became involved with the Theatre Academy in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and found herself in creating spaces and costumes for the stories of theatre plays. Later on her work naturally spread into telling storylines of exhibitions by working in the field of museum exhibition design. Recently Sanja has also begun to write stories herself – film scripts, dramas and puppet plays.

Sanja has designed for theatres in Slovenia and in the UK, for clients ranging from Royal Shakespeare Company to Edinburgh’s the Traverse Theatre and from London based Lumiere and Son to Slovene National Theatre. Her exhibition designs can be seen in Ireland, where she designed the permanent exhibition in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Book of Kells exhibition and the Museum of Chester Beatty as a project designer for Event Communications, as well as in Slovenia, where her independent work includes large scale exhibitions like the new Lipizzaner Museum Lipikum or Reflections of Distant Worlds in Slovene Etnoghraphic Museum and also small boutique private exhibitions like Our Fathers’ Footsteps at the Pule Estate.

Whether working in exhibition design or in theatre Sanja enjoys telling stories in and with space. She strongly believes in legibility, boldness and conveying a clear message. In her designs Sanja tries to use every possible means as a carrier of content and message, be it colour, shape, material, light. Reworking the totality until it is finely balanced is for her a challenge and a pleasure.