Ivana Vrbanić Fadjejev was born in 1925 in Zagreb; she went to primary and secondary school in Zagreb, and also took a BA in art history at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1952. Because of wartime and post-war conditions, she studied from 1944 to 1952, but while still a student was already working at the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Both parents were of German descent, and as a child she had learned German, which made it easier for her later to do translations. She spent a large part of her career in Karlovac Municipal Museum, where she was director.
She kept up constant links with the Federal Institute for the Conservation of Monuments of Culture, and travelled a lot, spending time in Vienna (1955-1957), and studied material about the Military Frontier in the Kriegsarchiv and in the Hofkammerarhiv; she collected material about fortifications in the area of the Karlovac district, including the fort of Karlovac itself. She microfilmed material collected for the Federal Institute. Her greatest distinction is having once again got the Karlovac Municipal Museum working, spending her time there until she retired. As well as the Collection of Documents from the People’s Revolution, the Culture History and Ethnographic Collections, Ivana Vrbanić Fadjejev also founded the Natural History Collection. She enlivened the museum with the foundation of a gallery of paintings, in which Ivana Vrbanić Fadjejev, having previously converted the building, for the first time mounted an exhibition of paintings of Vjekoslav Karas. She was president of the Regional Museums Section, dealt with the translation of specialised literature and documents for the Institute for the Conservation of Monuments of Culture.
For her work, she was given the City of Karlovac Prize, 1965; a Charter of Outstanding Success in the Museum Profession from the Federation of Associations of Museum Workers of Yugoslavia, 1983.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on February 6, 2002.