Born in Lezhe (Albania) in 1960, he trained at the School for the Arts and Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana. He has taken part in a number of national and international exhibitions and was acclaimed by the press for the expressive force of his brushstroke and for his intense, luminous colors. His artistic activity intensified and extended to include other visual arts; he produced a number of stage sets for Albanian, especially the Tirana theater that took part in the International festival of the Theater in Vienna in 1986 where his work was acclaimed by the critics who stressed his symbolic vein; for the Albanian cinema industry Kinostudio he produced feature length films and shorts as director of photography and cameraman again achieving success and critical acclaim. He continues to paint with alacrity, opening shows in the most important city of Italy and Europe. He derived enormous personal satisfaction in 1992 when the Pananti gallery of Florence ordered his portrait of Salvador Dalì to show in the exhibition on the great artist; the portrait has since been sold to a private collector in Tokyo.
Ivanaj paints independently and on order, doing portraits, landscapes, nudes, compositions, still lives, watercolors, expressing his strong instinctive bond with color and light, and with contrasts of both, always in the sphere of a broad symbolism that is traceable even in his glimpses of street scenes.
