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.