Prof. Livija Kroflin, PhD, was born in Zagreb, where she graduated in comparative literature and English language from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1980. She later earned her master’s degree with a thesis titled Puppetry in Zagreb from 1945 to 1985, and completed her doctorate with a dissertation titled The International Puppet Theatre Festival PIF 1968–2007 in the Context of European Puppetry.

As a literary translator, she held the status of an independent artist (1983). She worked as an editor at the publishing house Nakladni zavod Globus (1983–1987) and at the International Cultural Service Centre in Zagreb (1987–2007), first as the artistic director of PIF and later, for nine years, as the director of the Centre. From 2007 until her retirement in 2024, she was employed at the Department of Theatre Arts at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, where she led the puppetry program and taught courses in the history and aesthetics of puppetry. From 2015 to 2017, she served as head of the Department of Theatre Arts.

She is the selector of PIF performances and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Lutkanija and Velika Lutkanija book series. She has published the books Zagrebačka zemlja Lutkanija (Zagreb, 1992), Estetika PIF-a (Zagreb, 2012), Duša u stvari: Osnovne lutkarske tehnike i njihova primjena (Osijek, 2020), and Lutkarska čuda svijeta (Osijek, 2023). For the book Duša u stvari, she received the Demeter Award for annual achievement from the Croatian Society of Theatre Critics and Theatre Scholars. She is the author of numerous articles on puppetry, published both in Croatia and abroad, and regularly participates in international professional conferences on puppetry.

For many years, she was a member of the international Executive Committee of UNIMA (the International Puppetry Association) and served as president of UNIMA’s international commission Puppetry in Education, Development and Therapy. She is a member of UNIMA, the Croatian Centre of ITI, the Croatian Literary Translators Association, and the Croatian Society of Theatre Critics and Theatre Scholars.