Dona Kolar-Panov was educated in Croatia, Canada, and Australia. She received her PhD from Murdoch University, Western Australia, where she taught at the School of Humanities from 1989 to 1995. She moved to Skopje, Macedonia in 1995 and was the Head of the Postgraduate Department at the Institute for Sociological, Juridical and Political Research at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje (from 1995 to 2006) where in 1997 she founded the first Postgraduate Studies in Communication and Media in Macedonia, at Master’s and Doctoral level. She is considered to be the founder of Communication and Media Studies in Macedonia. As Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies at the New York University – Skopje (from 2007 to 2011), Mrs. Kolar-Panov redesigned the curriculum for the undergraduate degree in Communication and Media Studies and also founded and organized the first postgraduate studies in both, Public Relations and in Communication New Media. She continued her pioneering work in the field of New Media and was the Head of the Organizational Committees of two international communication conferences on blogging and social media, held at the New York University, Skopje, in 2008 and in 2009. Her interdisciplinary approach to research resulted in numerous books and publications, the most cited one being Video, War and Diasporic Imagination published by Routledge in 1997 (published in 11 print editions and republished in eight different electronic formats, from 2001 to 2010). Mrs. Kolar-Panov was also a member of the Expert Group for curriculum design and establishment of the first School of Journalism and Public Relations in Skopje. She was also a member of two Founding Committees for the School of Journalism and Public Relations in Skopje and for the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities. Alongside her academic activities, Mrs. Kolar-Panov served as a member of numerous expert groups, such as the Expert Group for the Foundation of the Broadcasting Council of Macedonia and the Expert Group for the Allocation of the First Broadcasting Licenses to Independent and Commercial Electronic Media in the Republic of Macedonia. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Communications at International Balkan University in Skopje.
