Jelena Uskoković was born in Belgrade in 1929. She was only a few months old when she was orphaned (her parents dying in a car crash), and she was brought up by a grandmother in Sarajevo, where she went to primary and secondary school, going on in Rijeka and Zagreb. From 1950 on she lived in Zagreb.
She took a BA (art history) at the Faculty of Philosophy of Zagreb University. After graduation, she went to America, taking a master’s (Seal of the University of Rochester, NY State), and then got a job in the National and University Library in Zagreb, working for three years and taking the national exam for librarians. Her other workplace, until retirement, was the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, where she ran the 19th and 20th Century Sculpture Gallery.
She took a doctorate at Zagreb University, Faculty of Philosophy, topic Mirko Rački.
She wrote three monographs: Nikola Reiser, 1975; Mirko Rački, 1979; Ksenija Kantoci, 1990. She also authored the catalogues for their retrospectives.
She has produced a number of monograph exhibitions: Šimunović, Stančić, Jordan and Reiser. As well as monograph-exhibitions, she was responsible for several big retrospectives from the holdings of the Modern Gallery. She wrote numerous articles and discussions, working with the journals Telegram, Svijet, 15 dana, Start and others.
While retired, she went on working with museums, and covered architectural sculpting in the city of Zagreb for the Museum of Arts and Crafts’s big exhibition Historicism in Zagreb.
She has worked with the Institute for the History of Art, and worked on the Croatian Biographical Lexicon and the Encyclopaedia of Croatian Art of the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute. For her work, she was awarded the decoration the Order of the Croatian Daystar with Figure of Marko Marulić.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on April 15, 2002.