Ivan Ramljak was born in 1974 in Zagreb. In the nineties, he studied at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb. In the second half of the 90s, he started working as a journalist and editor in written and electronic media, oriented towards film and musical art. At the end of the 90s, he was one of the initiators and editors of the cult pop magazine Nomad, as well as Radio Student, the first student radio station in Croatia, where he worked as an editor from 1997 to 2001. In the spring of 1999, together with a group of enthusiasts from the Udruženje za razvoj kulture (URK), he started the Močvara club in Zagreb, where he worked until 2004 as one of the club's managers, a concert organizer and DJ, and the author of the program 'Filmske večeri u Močvari'. In the winter of 2002, within the framework of URK, he started the Human Rights Film Festival Zagreb.

In the last ten years, he has mostly been involved in film directing and selection for film festivals and programs. After a series of short films - three feature films and one experimental film - which he co-directed with Marko Škobalj, in 2016 he became independent and focused exclusively on documentary films. Since then, he has directed five documentaries that have experienced great domestic and regional success, and have been shown at more than 80 festivals around the world. In addition, 'El Shatt…' was the most watched documentary film in cinemas in 2023.

In addition to directing films, from 2013 to 2022 he worked as the editor of the Kratki utorak program at the Tuškanac cinema for the Croatian Film Association, and from 2016 to 2023 as the artistic director and selector of the Tabor Film Festival. From the spring of 2022, he works as one of the short film selectors, as well as a scout for feature films from the former Yugoslavia, at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam. In the meantime, he completed his BA studies in cultural management at the Baltazar Polytechnic in Zaprešić, as well as his MA in documentary directing at the ADU in Zagreb.