Ivana Štrukelj aka Tratinchica was born in Zagreb on August 10th, 1980. She has been doodling since forever. But, since everybody in her family doodles for fun, nobody really took it seriously and she had to work on a 'proper' career. So, she had occasional graffiti weekend outbursts while working as a journalist and a part time DJ, until 2004 when she graduated from the Journalism Faculty of Political Sciences. Shortly after that, she gave up on graffiti, DJ-ing and journalism as well, and got a serious job in an advertising agency as a copywriter. At work, she made friends with old copy machine and while pausing from hard work, she started making street art stickers for after work sticking fun. When the copy machine got fired, she was forced to learn computer programs in order to continue sticking the city up. After learning the basics and discovering numerous sites and magazines that promote character design, her life finally began to make sense.

When not traveling around, she happily lives, works and creates in Zagreb.