Nada Vrkljan Križić was born in Belgrade in 1940. She spent her childhood in Zagreb, however (1940-1950) and in Opatija (1950-1958), her father being an hotelier. From 1958 she lived in Zagreb. She took a bachelor’s degree at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, having read French and art history. After her degree, she was for six years a translator in Siemens, for German. After that, for nine years she was conservator in the Regional Institute for the Conservation of Monuments of Culture; for 12 years she was curator and senior curator in the Gallery of Primitive Art in Zagreb ; and for the rest of her career she was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, museum adviser and manager of the Outsider Art department.
She spent six months at the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique in Brussels (1979) studying conservation of art objects and the production of documentation concerning the art heritage. As well as working continuously in museum institutions, she worked with specialised periodicals, publishing texts studies and essays on contemporary music – jazz and chansons, and was a freelancer for Radio Zagreb I, II and III, as well as HTV.
In the last few years she has worked regularly with almost all the established periodicals dealing with culture and the arts. Her bibliography has a substantial number of texts, forewords to catalogues, monograph catalogues and numerous lectures given at home and abroad. She is the author of many exhibitions, including the presentations Outsiders or Marginal Art at Insita 94, international review of the Naive in Bratislava. She has been particularly interested in the painting of Karlo Sirovy (1896-1948) and in many other outsiders, revealing something of the marvellous world of the Outsider. She spent 2000 in France, on a Maison des cultures du monde / French government scholarship, on a course meant for foreign experts in culture and the arts. From 2002 she was editor of the specialised journal Vijesti muzealaca i konzervatora of the Croatian Museum Association For her work she was made Chevalier de l ordre des Arts et des Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on September 25, 2002.