Joanna Łopat-Réno

Joanna Łopat-Réno was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Ammar in the Polish wardrobe. A story about hiding refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border.

Joanna Łopat-Réno is a journalist, reporter and photographer, author of television and press reports. 

Born in Warsaw, she studied in Łódź (Cultural Studies at the University of Łódź and Photography at the Łódź Film School) and in Italy (Program Erasmus at Università della Tuscia, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere), where she stayed on for five more years. 

In 2015, she covered the refugee crisis in the Balkans and started working with the Polish news television outlet TVN24 Biznes i Świat as a world news service editor. 

Since 2020, she has been a freelance journalist cooperating with OKO.Press as well as “Duży Format” – the magazine of reporters of Gazeta Wyborcza. Since October 2021, she has been reporting from the Polish-Belarusian border.

She hosts “Non-normative Conversations” – a podcast produced for the magazine “Liberté”. Her guests are people who are often excluded because of their views and sexual orientation. And it is to them that she gives voice.

She is a co-author in several publications focusing on human rights published by the European Liberal Forum (“Free Voices. LGBT+ Rights in Eastern Europe”; “Democracy without Minorities”) and a contributer in projects on evidence-based sexuality education
and anti-discrimination education managed by the Projekt: Polska Foundation.

Since 2018, she has been involved in the One Caucasus project – an international festival organised in a Georgian region Marneuli – considered to be one of the poorest in the country. It is a project involving local communities (Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani) in artistic activities.

She is an active member of the Po-Nad-To Foundation, an organisation working in the field of creative education. She runs documentary photography and film workshops for children and young people.

Elena Stancu

Elena Stancu was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Sacrificed lives: on Romanian women looking after elderly people in Italy.

Elena Stancu is a Romanian journalist who lives in a camper van and travels throughout Europe to document Romanian immigrants. She has been working as a journalist for 17 years; her reporting focuses on extreme poverty, domestic violence, life in Romanian prisons, the drug crisis in Romanian hospitals, racism, discrimination and migration. She worked for five years for Marie Claire Romania as a Features Editor and later as a Deputy Editor-in-Chief. In 2013, she resigned and moved into a camper van with her partner, photographer Cosmin Bumbuț, in order to work on documentary projects. She has won several journalism awards and grants, including fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and the Carter Center in the US and the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. She has made two independent documentaries, The Last Kalderash (2016) and The Residents (2018), and her stories have been published in the book Acasă, pe drum [At Home on the Road] (Humanitas, 2017). In 2019, she began a documentary project on Romanian diaspora communities. She writes about Romanians picking strawberries in Spain, seasonal workers in the fields of Germany, Romanian doctors in the UK and badanti (carers) in Italy.