Sonja Hristina Bjelić
Sonja Hristina Bjelić is a writer, researcher, and birth worker whose practice sits at the intersection of poetics, performance, and the body. At present, she is a doctoral candidate in Balkan Studies at the University of Ljubljana, where her research explores Romani women’s experiences of maternal healthcare in Serbia. Sonja holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and recently completed The Seventh Hour, a long-form poetry project that moves between history and myth, narrative and dislocation. Her creative and scholarly practices are deeply intertwined and she maintains a movement practice rooted in calisthenics and improvisation. As a birth worker, Softly Circle Perinatal encompasses her praxis of embodied, relational support across the perinatal continuum.
Based between Belgrade, Serbia, and New York City, Sonja lives with her partner, with whom she collaborates, and their desert dog, Trout.
At the Nomadic School in 2026, Sonja led participants through a day-long workshop exploring how silence and movement can be used to generate creative texts. Drawing upon Anne Carson’s concept of “metaphysical silence” as well as her investigation into the notion of translation, participants were asked to approach texts as bodies that contain untranslatable silences. Guided by the lens of “relationality” within reproductive theory, movement exercises provided an experiential way of seeing writing as a process of discovery, disruption, and negotiation. In turn, participants used poetic constraints to produce texts that were later performed through song as embodied expression.
