Milena Jančurić was born in Novi Sad on September 18, 1986. Her musical life started early and locally: the children's choir Zvončići, then the "Josip Slavenski" music school, then secondary music training at "Isidor Bajić" in Novi Sad, before she moved on to classical flute performance at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, graduating in 2010. Unlike most jazz flutists, who arrive at the instrument by doubling from saxophone or clarinet, Jančurić trained on flute from childhood — a distinction that shows up in the fluency and control of her playing.

In the summer of 2011 she began further study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, graduating Magna Cum Laude two years later from the Performance Division and receiving the Performance Division Dean's Award in Recognition of Outstanding Musicianship. Her teachers there included Matt Marvuglio — then dean of the Performance department, and by her own account a formative mentor who pushed her toward an authentic voice rather than imitation — along with Ljubiša Jovanović, Marco Pignataro, Danilo Pérez, Fernando Brandao, Scott Free, and Mitch Haupers. It was at Berklee that the classically trained flutist found her way into improvisation and composition. She founded the Milena Jančurić Trio in February 2013 and gave its debut concert in Boston that month.

Back in Serbia and across Europe, she built a working life as a bandleader, sideman, and educator. She has led or fronted the Milena Jančurić Trio/Group, which by 2022 had grown into the Milena Jančurić Quintet, and performs regularly with the Vega Nova Quartet (a Brazilian-repertoire group with guitarists Branko Trijić and Aleksandar Đorđević), the Ana Ćurčin Trio (also billed as "Tri Lepe"), and the Aleksandar Dujin Orchestra — Dujin also plays piano on her own records. She has performed at the Novi Sad Jazz Festival (both as a leader and, in 2019, with the Aleksandar Dujin Orchestra) and, per festival listings, the Belgrade Jazz Festival, and has toured more broadly across the United States, Panama, Poland, France, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.

Since 2016 she has been part of the Internal Compass Institute's circle of musicians in Jerusalem and Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, performing and teaching in workshops there. That connection produced her first commercially released album: Collage of Moments (released November 1, 2016), a trio recording made with Japanese pianist Haruka Yabuno and Israeli bassist Ehud Ettun, captured live during a 2015 European tour and built from seven spontaneous, largely improvised pieces. Through the second half of the 2010s she also worked as a session and guest flutist on other Serbian and regional records: Belgrade downtempo/trip-hop act Kezz's self-titled album (2017), the Miloš Branisavljević Quartet's Far Away (2018), and singer-saxophonist Sanja Marković's Ascension (2020, A.MA Records) — the record that connected her to the Bari, Italy-based label that would later release her own debut.

That debut, Shapes and Stories, followed on November 19, 2021, on A.MA Records/A.MA Edizioni — all seven tracks composed by Jančurić and recorded with a septet of Serbian musicians: Aleksandar Dujin (piano), Ervin Malina (double bass), Petar Radmilović (drums), Lazar Novkov (accordion, melodica), Aleksandra Denda (vocals), and her brother Milan Jančurić (tenor saxophone, who also mixed and mastered the record). She now splits her time based out of Bari, Italy, home of her label. In 2020 she also co-wrote and recorded "Košuta" with pianist Ana Ćurčin and bassist Marko Cvetković — released on the various-artists compilation Piano Sky: Natural Selection (2022) and separately on streaming — a real-world recording that backs up her ongoing work with Ćurčin. Her most prominent guest credit to date came in 2023, when Italian soul-jazz producer and bandleader Nicola Conte featured her flute on "Heritage," a track on his Far Out Recordings album Umoja — an album that put her playing in front of a considerably larger international audience than her own catalog reaches on its own. She also guested on 12 Angry Mushroom (2024, A.MA Records) by the fusion group Bosque Sound Community. Some 2024-era coverage (The Flute View's Serbian Spotlight) referenced a follow-up to Shapes and Stories as being in the works; no confirmed title, date, or label could be found for it, so it is noted here only as a reported work in progress, not a fact.

Jančurić's defining trait as a player is that she came up as a flutist first, not a doubler — her classical grounding at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade gives her tone and technique a rigor that the jazz-flute tradition doesn't always have, while her Berklee years under Matt Marvuglio, Danilo Pérez, and others opened her into improvisation and original composition. The result is a catalog that moves comfortably across borders: straight-ahead and contemporary jazz on her own Shapes and Stories, free/spontaneous improvisation on Collage of Moments, Brazilian repertoire with Vega Nova Quartet, and Mediterranean/Italian soul-jazz in her guest work for Nicola Conte and the A.MA Records roster — plus at least one outright pop/downtempo credit (Kezz) that shows she doesn't limit herself to jazz rooms. In interviews she has described improvisation as inseparable from life itself ("we all live life by improvising, day by day") and has spoken about writing pieces inspired by ordinary physical movement — walking, footsteps, stairs — rather than abstract musical ideas, and about prioritizing the people she plays with over the instrumentation itself. That everyday-motion-as-melody approach is audible directly in Shapes and Stories track titles like "Purple Shoes Steps" and "Steps And Curls."