Zivančevic published her first book in 1982 for which she won the National Award for poetry in Yugoslavia.[1] From 1980 to 1981 she worked as a teaching assistant and secretary to Allen Ginsberg. She worked as a literary editor for East Village Eye and Theater X, as a freelance journalist for Politika, El Pais, L'Unita, Woman (Spain), and Nexus, and as a contributor to The New Yorker and New York Arts Magazine. Besides having performed with The Living Theater (1988-1992) and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, she co-founded in 1988 the Odiyana Theatre. She is author of more than twenty books and has translated notable works of poetry into Serbian. In 2001 she completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies at Université Nancy 2 with a thesis on the modernist literature of Serbian writer Milos Crnjanski.[2][3] That same year she contributed the text 'Pandora's Box' to the Semiotext(e) reader Hatred of Capitalism, in which she addresses the war in Yugoslavia, and in relation to which she worked in 1996 as an official Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian translator for the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the Hague.[4] In 2002 she received a Special Grant from the American PEN association of writers presided by Robert Creeley. She presently serves on the editorial committee of the journal Au Sud de l'Est.[5] She lives in Paris and teaches languages and the theatre of the avant-gardes at Paris University.[6]
