Dubravka Balen Letunić was born in 1942 in Zagreb, where she took a degree in archaeology from the Faculty of Philosophy. She has spent her whole career in the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, in which she attained the rank of museum adviser and the position of manager of the Prehistory Department.
She has been engaged with research work, and has worked at excavations throughout Croatia (prehistoric settlements and necropolises of Vukovar’s Lijeva bara, the Iapodean necropolises of the Ogulin area, stone tools from Hrvatsko Zagorje, test digs in the village of Trovrh, a revision excavation of the tumulus of the Early Iron Age, research into the hill fort of Trsište in Trošmarija by Ogulin, and so on).
After the Homeland War, with a group of workers, she carried out an audit of the Ilok Municipal Museum.
She has written many articles, which were most commonly but not only published in Vjesnik of the Archaeology Museum Zagreb, the Yearbook of Varaždin Municipal Museum, Museum Vjesnik, Osijek Collection and others. She has authored several catalogues, among which of particular importance is Iapod Warriors between East and West. She wrote a guide to the Prehistory Department, and a bibliography of Dr Ksenija Vinski Gasparin (1950-1987), and in 2004 worked out the conception for the new permanent display of the Prehistory Department of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb. She has had several international exhibitions, in for example Arezzo and Torino.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on January 28, 2004