Associate Professor Jelena Matančević was born in 1982 in Zagreb, where she completed elementary and secondary school. She enrolled in the university study of social work at the Faculty of Law, University in Zagreb in 2000. She graduated in 2006 and enrolled in the Master of Arts in Comparative European Social Studies in Maastricht, which she completed in 2007. From November 2007 she was employed as a research assistant on the project by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport entitled Civil society and mixed social policy in Croatia. From 2009 until 2014 she attended the postgraduate university doctoral study of social policy, and in April 2014 she earned a doctoral degree having defended the thesis entitled Characteristics of the Welfare Mix Model in Social Services in Croatia. From 2014 she was employed as a postdoctoral research assistant, and since 2016 as an associate professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Department of Social Policy.

She participated in the international research project Civil Society Index from 2008 until 2010. To date, she has taken part in two FP7 projects: WILCO – Welfare Innovations at Local Levels in Favour of Cohesion from 2010 until 2014, and TSI – Third Sector Impact from 2014 until 2019. From October 2014 until December 2015 she participated in the scientific project Indicators of child welfare and child poverty in Croatia in the time of crisis: How to end the vicious circle of child poverty financed by the Adris Foundation. She participated in and presented at several domestic and international scientific and professional conferences.  Areas of her scientific interest include civil society and the nonprofit sector, social innovation and the development of the welfare mix model. She is a member of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) and the Center for development of non-profit organisations (CERANEO), within which she participated in numerous action-research projects.