Jelena holds master degree in Democracy and Human rights (University of Sarajevo and University of Bologna) and a bachelor degree in Japanese language and literature from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. Her experience with civil society sector, in addition to the IPE Fellowship, includes coordination of activities and advocacy on enabling the environment for civil society development in the Western Balkan region, comparative research on aid modalities to civil society through IPA Civil Society Facility in BiH and Serbia, and field research on FP7 MAXCAP project in Serbia. She is currently working as a monitoring officer for Perform project in Serbia.

As a research fellow at the Institute for Political Ecology, she worked on democratization models of public services (railway sector) in Croatia and Japan. Her interests lie in discovering social patterns and models in both social science and humanities and natural science.