Olga Maruševski was born in Popovača in 1922. She graduated from the Zagreb Upper Town lyceum, enrolled in the Law faculty, and worked as a clerk in the Treasury; from 1945 she was in the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb as part time trainee working on the bibliography of domestic fine arts.
In 1957 she took a BA (art history) at the Faculty of Philosophy, and in 1986 took a doctorate with a dissertation on Iso Kršnjavi.
From 1951 to 1973 she worked in the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute in Zagreb, and later was an expert collaborator in the Institute for the History of Art in Zagreb. She spent a lot of her productive time to research into recent Austrian and Germany art history literature of the 19th century and to the architecture of Zagreb, Karlovac, Slavonski Brod and Križevci in the same period. She sometimes worked part time as a costume designer for Jadran Film. The greatest number of her academic writings were devoted to Kršnjavi.
Apart from town planning topics, she was among the first to pay serious attention to the religious art of the 19th century, publishing numerous articles in specialised journals. She also drew attention to the fine arts of the 19th century.
From her capacious bibliography, writings that are fascinated with the personality and work of Iso Kršnjavi, whose archives she studied thoroughly, particularly stand out. She was among the first to research into the beginnings of art and specialised vocational education and published numerous publications in this area.
She published her works in numbers papers and journals: Vijesti muzealaca i konzervatora, Vjesnik, Večernji list, Bulletin Razreda za likovne umjetnosti JAZU, Kaj, Čovjek i prostor, Vijenac and Peristil.
She authored several books and numerous forewords to catalogues of well-known exhibitions. She was rewarded for her work with the City of Zagreb Prize, 1998; the Order of the Croatian Daystar with Figure of Marko Marulić in 1998 and Memorial of the Art History Institute. She was given the Radovan Ivančević Prize of the Association of Art Historians for Lifetime Achievement on April 18, 2007.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on March 13, 2003.