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.