As a little girl, she didn’t play with cars or put up posters of Ferraris and Porsches on the walls of her room. Neither was Ana Zadnik in a hurry to get behind the wheel of a car. She took her driving test after receiving a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana; however, her entry into the world of cars was no accident.

– I never had a special passion for cars. I always looked at them solely as objects of design and engineering. My degree in sculpture was the result of my love for physical creativity, and design has always interested me in all its aspects, from fashion to architecture and furniture. In the course of my studies, I had the opportunity to attend several student exchanges in the European Union and they were all on the topic of automotive engineering. That wasn’t intentional, though. I happened to be accepted into courses with this topic, but when I combined these three branches, the idea of car design as a job appeared that would unite everything I love to do and which I had the opportunity to learn about in several years of study, explains the course of her life Ana Zadnik, this woman from Rijeka who has lived in Munich for the past six years and who works in the design department of Mini.

The key moment that determined Ana’s choice of profession was in 2005, when, thanks to excellent results in her studies (in 2003, she received the Prešern Student Award, the highest recognition of the University in Ljubljana), she was granted a scholarship by the Slovenian government to study at the famous Royal College of Art in London. While studying in London, she did a two-month internship in Japan, more precisely in Toyota; her prestigious degree then led her to the Renault Nissan group, and for the next five years she lived and worked in Bucharest, Barcelona and Paris. In 2012, her professional career took her into the fold of Jaguar Land Rover, and two years later she moved to the Bavarian capital, where she was first an external associate for the BMW Group. In 2015, she became a permanent member of the design department in charge of the Mini’s interior design.