Throughout her career, Nela has delivered creative projects for organisations including the Royal Opera House, Barbican, Arts Council England, John Lewis, Al Jazeera, Campbell Works, Oxo Tower, LIFT, and London Film Festival. Nela ran Refugees and the Arts Initiative – a British national organisation for the ‘refugee arts’ and her work has been displayed at the Olympic stadium in London.
She developed the project Balkanising Taxonomy for her PhD where she researched the city as a site of spectacle and the culture of protest. Nela continues working on art and public space in Belgrade through Kulturklammer, centre for cultural interactions. She is a recipient of the European Cultural Foundation Artistic Grant for the project Wedding Bellas and she won Southwark community arts award for her project Here Comes Everybody in 2015.
She conducted research for Gulbenkian Foundation about participatory art, Greater London Authority about creative responses to COVID-19 and worked on the project TimeCase: Memory in Action with a Grundtvig grant. Nela has been funded by Association of Art Historians and British Society of Aesthetics for research projects about the sculptor Olga Jevric and inauguration of Postsocialism and Art research platform at UAL. She is a Member of TRAIN research centre and was an Associate of Social Design Institute at the same institution.
She is a reviewer of UCL Press, Palgrave MacMillan, the Journal for Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Memory Studies Journal, Studia Politica, Feminist Review, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Nela is a co-chair of Art and Memory Working Group of Memory Studies Association (MSA). She evaluates EU’s Creative Europe, COST applications in humanities and is a consultant for the Science Fund of Republic of Serbia. Nela is part of the AHRC funded Peace and Conflict Cultural Network and Arts and Reconciliation research project for which she has created an installation Text Illuminations. She is co-editor of a Special Issue of the Journal of Organisational Aesthetics about London Design Festival at LCC and Contemporary Ideas on the Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Photography, IGI Global (2023). Nela is on editorial board of the Journal of Arts and Communities and is a founding member of Space and Place research hub at UAL.
She is a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy. Nela is part of PhD supervisory teams for doctoral students – Marta Marciska and Hannah Kemp-Welch (Techne), Vera Zurburgg, Mireia Ludevid Llop, Ewelina Warner, Vija Skangale, Andreea Paciu and Miriam Sorrentino and would continue supervising students working in memory studies field as well as participatory arts. She has acted as an external examiner at UNSW, Sydney and UPV/EHU University of the Basque Country and is a member of Community for Artistic and Architectural Research (CA²RE).
Nela is interested in the intersection of time and space, which has brought her to many multi-media and mapping projects where she’s dealt with memory, digital archives, cultural activism, city, participation and East European art.