Ivana Brkić

Ivana Brkić is a pop singer from Zagreb, born there on 11 September 1986, who in the first half of the 2000s was the most popular teenage pop star in Croatia. Dance music was her home genre, later widened to pop. Since 2011, under her married name Ivana Mesić, she has lived in Ljubljana with her husband, a classical musician.

She started very young, at twelve. Early in 1999 she released her first single and video, "Svaki pogled tvoj", followed that autumn by "Bez tebe". Her mother, Dragica Brkić, was one of the best-known kafana singers in Zagreb in the 1980s and 1990s. In the autumn of 2000 Ivana released her first album, Prste k sebi, with songs by a remarkable team of writers including Gibonni, Vlada Divljan of Idoli and Davor Tolja, while Enes Tvrtković produced all three of her albums. With "Opraštam ti" she won the award for best debutant at Zadarfest in October 2000. In 2001 alone she made five music videos, twenty in her whole career.

The second album, Uzmi sve, came out in the autumn of 2002, just after her sixteenth birthday, and made her the biggest teenage star in the country. It was a modern eurodance record built on songs by Croatian rock writers: Hus of Parni valjak, Marijan Ban, Darko Rundek, Javor Jeić of Stampedo and Coki of Jinx. Its lead single "Samo šuti" was written by Marijan Ban, and the album earned a silver record for more than 7,500 copies. Between 2002 and 2005 came her biggest hits: "SMS", "Samo šuti", "Nije me sram", "Previše od mene tražiš", "Oči boje kestena", "Nježno, nježnije" and "Kora pod nogama". She played clubs in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

She sang at the Hrvatski radijski festival every year from 2001 to 2005, and in 2005 "Kora pod nogama" was voted hit of the year there. Late in 2005 she released her third album, Sve je samo fol, with "Luda mala" by Goran Ratković Rale and Marina Tucaković; readers of the teen magazine OK! named it album of the year. Soon after, at the height of her fame, she left music to devote herself to her faith, as she explained in a farewell interview in March 2006. A compilation, The Best of Collection, followed in 2021.