Sava Šumanović (Serbian: Сава Шумановић, 1896-1942) was a 20th-century Serbian painter.

Sava Šumanović was born in Vinkovci, today's Croatia in 1896. He graduated from High School in Zemun, across the Danube from Belgrade, where he was first introduced to the art of painting. He later enrolled in the College of Arts in Zagreb then lived in Paris for a while, only to return to Serbia and the town of Šid in 1930. He lived in Šid until the beginning of World War II, when the Independent State of Croatia Ustaše's police arrested him with 150 Serbian citizens and took them to a concentration camp in Sremska Mitrovica, where he was ruthlessly executed together with many other Serbs.

His early artistic style was characterized by many different influences, first of all Cubism but Fauvism and Expressionism as well. In later works, Sava Šumanović managed to develop his own artistic expression, which he called "the way I know and can." Due to innovations, he can be described as one of the most prominent painters of the first half of 20th century originating from ex-Yugoslavia.

Marina Abramović (Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић; born November 30, 1946) is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Marina Abramović's great uncle was Patriarch Varnava of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Both of her parents were Partisans during the Second World War: her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade.

Abramović's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."