rada šešić, the netherlands
DOC WORKSHOP 2026 – LECTURER & TUTOR
doc workshop 2025 / 2024 / 2023 / 2022 – LECTURER & TUTOR
Festival programmer, lecturer, critic, and director, Rada was born in the former Yugoslavia and is currently based in Utrecht/The Netherlands. For over two decades, she collaborated with IDFA Amsterdam in various roles, including as a member of the selection committee, a selector for the IDFA Fund, and coordinator of all juries. She has been heading the Documentary Competition at the Sarajevo FF for the past 17 years, where she also co-founded and continues to co-lead the Docu Rough Cut Boutique. Additionally, she participates in project selection for the Doha Film Institute.
In Italy, she is the artistic director of Last Stop Trieste at WEMW (since 2014), and a programmer for the Documentary Competition at the Trieste FF. From 2000 to 2020, she was a selector for South Asian cinema at the IFF Rotterdam, where she also curated several major focus programs.
Rada lectures in the Master of Film program at the Netherlands Film and TV Academy in Amsterdam. She is one of the founders of the Eastern Neighbours Film Festival in The Hague, where she was artistic director for 15 years. At the University of Amsterdam, within the Media Studies department, she taught South Asian cinema for seven years, and has also been a lecturer at the Dutch Institute for Film Education (NIF).
She has been a mentor at numerous workshops across Europe and Asia, including Visions du Réel (Nyon), Doc Lab Poland, Baltic Sea Forum (Riga), DocLisboa, Ex Oriente (Czech Republic), Dragon Forum, Balkan Discoveries, DunaDoc (Budapest), Doc Edge (Kolkata), DocWok (New Delhi), and RCLab (Movies That Matter).
Rada has collaborated on several publications, including 24 Frames by Dina Iordanova, books on Indian filmmakers Bimal Roy, Mani Kaul, and Girish Kasaravalli, as well as the World Encyclopaedia of Documentary Cinema (Routledge), edited by Ian Aitken.
After serving as an assistant director on fiction feature films and directed several documentaries in Bosnian production prior to the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, she directed four documentaries and one dance film in the Netherlands. Her films have been screened at around 60 festivals and have received awards across Europe, Asia, and the USA, including Room Without a View (1997), Soske (2001), In Whitest Solitude (2001), and The Way to School (2007).
One of her films was invited for screening and is now archived at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 2008 and 2010, Rada taught cinema for one trimester at Srishti in Bangalore, India. She has also been a guest lecturer at film schools in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Geneva, UCLA, Eskişehir, Belgrade, Sarajevo, New Delhi, Trivandrum, and Kolkata.
Rada is a member of NETPAC and the European Film Academy. She served as a jury member for documentaries at the EFA in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 she was part of the film selection committee. She has also served as a jury member at around 50 international festivals, including IDFA, Hot Docs Toronto, MIFF Mumbai, Cinéma du Réel, Kolkata IFF, Moscow FF, Alma-Ata EuroAsia, Karlovy Vary, IFF Sofia, Doc Barcelona, Go East Wiesbaden, and Tangier FF.