Ana Kazimić (1985, Serbia) graduated from primary and secondary music school as the best student in her generation. She acquired her BA and MA degrees from the class of Zoran Mulić at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, composing ballet music as her final graduation project. As a student, she won three University awards. She is currently working on a dance fantasia inspired by verses by F. G. Lorca, as her final doctoral project at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, supervised by Zoran Erić.

She was the laureate of the young composers’ competition held under the auspices of the Triorca project initiated by Norfolk County Council’s Music Service in England in 2012. At the International Composition Competition commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan, her piece was awarded as the best.

Kazimić has performed as a pianist, dancer, and choral singer (in Serbia, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Hungary). During the season of 2013–14 she volunteered and performed at the National Theatre in Belgrade (as a composer, choreographer, and dancer). From among her dance awards, she singles out the first place at the 2013 World Competition.

Piruete smaragda (Emerald Pirouettes, 2014) – this vision of a music box features a decorative emerald on the top, which rotates as the box’s mechanism moves. When the mechanism starts moving, the rotating emerald’s reflections generate various imaginations. Three different characters of one and the same set of musical material may be perceived as the rigidity of false dignity (the path from a simple, reserved cheerfulness to a twisted and clumsy dignity), an attempt of the pathetic to break through (a struggle of emotions, between sincerity and exaggeration), and a magic game that takes us from a simple, poignant, and somewhat foreboding tenderness to the despair of false dignity again, now in a different guise, but thankfully only for a little while, because the music box mechanism prevents it from ‘singing its tune to the end’ and thus from sucking us into the trance of its despair. In this instance as well, the musical flow of the entire piece is occasionally interrupted by breakdowns and repairs in the mechanism. What remains after all of that rewinding and repairing is the pure beauty of the emerald.