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Photo credits: First - Vlad Roman, Second - Ciprian Hord.

Lavinia Braniște was born in 1983 in Brăila. She studied foreign languages and literatures in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest and now she lives in Bucharest, where she translates children’s literature and sometimes writes.

She started writing poetry when she was in primary school and grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories, who used to make her cardboard toys and colourful kites which they flew “on the railway”. Together with her grandfather she would crawl under a wire fence and into the nursery garden near the railways, where they would gather grass for the chickens and yellow dandelions for her mother. With her grandmother, she would pick up thistles to put on the house roof on Whit Sunday, and the next morning they would inspect them to see whose luck had grown the most. “Children’s books fell on me out of the blue after a twenty-year break, during which I changed jobs and rents and learned to live on my own,” Lavinia Branişte confesses. “I write because I like it. And it took me twenty years to admit to this openly.”

She published Povești cu mine (poems, 2006), Cinci minute pe zi (short stories, 2011), Escapada (short stories, 2014), Rostogol merge acasă (short novel for children, 2016) and Interior zero (novel, 2016).

First photo by Radu Afrim. Second photo by Angelique Surrel.

Gianina Cărbunariu – theatre director. Among recent performances: Vorbiți Tăcere?/ Sprechen Sie Schweigen?, Oameni obișnuiți and Solitaritate at the Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, Artists Talk, producer Arcub, co-producer of Piese Refractare, De vînzare/For Sale and Tipografic Majuscul at the Odeon Theatre, X mm din Y km at Fabrica de Pensule in Cluj – producted by Colectiv A, and Sold Out at the Kammerspiele Theatre in Munchen. In 2014, she was invited with the Solitaritate performance in the official selection of the Avignon Festival, and in 2016, she was again present in the festival selection as the playwright of the Tigern performance produced by the Swedish company Jupither Josephsson. In 2015, De Vînzare/For Sale performance has received the UNITER award for the best performance of the year. Artists Talk is nominated at UNITER in the Best Performance of the Year in 2016 category.

Other participations at international festivals: The International Liège Festival, New Plays From Europe Wiesbaden Biennale, Wiener Festwochen, Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, International Theatre Festival Dialog-Wroclaw, International Theatre Festival Kontakt in Torun, Konfrontacje Festival in Lublin, Divadelná Nitra Festival in Slovakia, LIFT Londra, New Drama in Budapest, Mladi Levi in Ljubljana, New Drama in Moscow etc.

Her plays were also mounted by other directors in European theaters such as the Royal Court in London, Schaubuhne Berlin, Munich Kammerspiele, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and also in the USA, Canada, South America, Japan, Israel, Istanbul etc.

Adi Bulboacă was born in the summer of 1988 and sixteen years later he started taking photos. In all the cities he goes, he always knows where to find two things - the theater and the train stations. 

He seeks to capture the patina in all the environments he interacts with, because he believes that the goal of photography is that of encapsulating time. ”Time passes over objects, and it’s the more or less subtle trail it leaves behind that interests me with every frame.”

http://adibulboaca.ro

Constantin Vică is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and researcher at the Research Centre in Applied Ethics, University of Bucharest. His main fields of interest are computer and information ethics, roboethics, philosophy of computer science, social and political philosophy, and the critique of intellectual property. 

He published several articles and studies on information and ownership, intelligent assistive technologies, online trust, web search engines ethics, digital dialectics, pirate politics, evolution of programming languages, and free software, authorship and intellectual property; he also co-edited „Filosofia științelor umane. In memoriam Mihail Radu Solcan” (2015, University of Bucharest Press).

Paul Breazu is a Romanian journalist, with an experience of over a decade in the area of lifestyle magazines. In parallel, he collaborated with cultural magazines such as REPUBLIK, Sunete and Dilema Veche, writing articles on music and pop culture. 

Currently he is involved in projects dealing with the archeology of Romanian pop music (Batiscaf Radio, Discotecă) and the cultural, social and political condition of the music belonging to/produced in marginal/marginalised communities (PARADAIZ). He is also a DJ—under the alias Rekabu—and writes a regular column on music in Dilema Veche magazine.

Discotecă

Batiscaf Radio

PARADAIZ

Sorina Vazelina (b. 1986) is a sort of illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer,
with pretzels for brains. Over the past ten years she has been dabbling in a variety of techniques, ranging from vector graphics and collage, to etching and screen printing. She graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from the Arts Faculty in Timișoara and received an MA in Graphic Arts from the National Arts University of Bucharest. Synopsis Media and It’s Everyday are two of the visual communication studios that moulded the creature that today goes by the pseudonym Vazelina.

Having collaborated with the likes of Esquire magazine Romania, Playboy, Omagiu, Tataia, Regard Revue, Vice and Scena9, Sorina has developed a distinct chameleonic approach to editorial illustration. She has been publishing her own booklets and zines for a while now, and alongside Primitiv Print’s screen printer Grigore, they have developed a collection of bizarre posters and trinkets.

http://www.vazelina.ro

By Elena Văduva.

Oana Șandru wears purple sneakers. “Well, they are somewhat purple.” She is from Reșița, a ”shrinking city”, as she calls it, where everyone knows everyone and where you can’t make a move without other people noticing it. In Bucharest, Oana is creative and designs bags.  

From basketball, a sport she thought she was good at but realized that her teacher didn’t really know the rules of, to chemistry, which she loved and dreamed of pursuing, Oana decided to become a copywriter. She wanted to use her love for poetry in creative projects, so she applied to SNSPA in Bucharest. A lot of her friends went to Timișoara, a city much closer to Reșița, so Oana felt really alone in Bucharest, where she found herself surrounded by unknown people and buildings.

In the second year of college, things changed. She got an internship at Mercury360, an advertising agency where she currently works. She remembers the internship very well. She didn’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, so she downloaded it the night before the final meeting. Her task was to create an advertising campaign for a real client, a brand of memory pills. She managed to finish the project by using a casino table for her advertising poster. She wrote: ”How many cards can you remember?”, a clear reference to the movie (and game) 21. She never imagined that her project was going to open the door to a career as a copywriter.

When she was 16, Oana decided it was time for her to create something special. One of her friends was already making bracelets and some girls from another class were even part of a makers association. She decided to design bags, so she asked her mother to buy her a sewing machine. They bought it from Top Shop, a teleshopping business, and Oana remembers she could only use it once. She managed to create a bag out of some old jeans, even if the sewing machine could not handle the entire job and she had to sew by hand the last part. She posted it on her newly made blog and on breslo.ro, a site for handmade clothes and accessories. Her bag was bought in two hours, so Oana knew her business was going to work. Now, several years later, Oana still makes bags and she sells them through her facebook profile.

Oana can’t remember the first time she attended CreativeMornings Bucharest. She just used the opportunity to meet with some friends and, since then, being with us every morning became a sort of monthly escape for her. She loves the coffee and the people who come to speak at CreativeMornings. She hopes she will one day sum up the courage to ask the questions she wants to ask. She always has lots of questions for the speakers, but she never dares to raise her hand up. Being shy is a part of her personality. Just as her purple sneakers.

Elena Calistru is the chair and founder of Funky Citizens, a Romanian NGO that builds research-based, data-driven online advocacy tools. Their tools aim to be educational and actionable, encouraging citizens to engage in accountability and government responsibility initiatives in which they can see an impact.

Elena has over 8 years experience in civil society projects, both at national and international level. Her expertise is mainly in the area of good governance, transparency, public finance and advocacy. She strongly believes that data and online tools can empower citizens to influence public sector reform.

http://www.funky.ong

Irina Tacu - Content Creator

Irina has known ever since she was in high school that she wanted to become a journalist. She wanted to write about ”real stuff”, and to talk with people about their life. The year she got admitted into journalism school  (FJSC) was the year when DoR magazine was launched, and she told herself that that was the place where she wanted to work.

In the summer of the first year of university she got an internship at DoR and met the team behind the magazine. In her second year of studies, Irina earned an Erasmus scholarship in the Czech Republic. After that she focused on her dissertation project on the subject of news agencies. After graduating, she worked at Mediafax for two years and a half in the online department, and than she moved to Europa FM. Last year she got her dream job at DoR after pitching a story to Cristian Lupșa. Now she works as a reporter and she takes care of the magazine’s social media accounts. 

Irina knew about CreativeMornings Bucharest, but she never attended the events before she became a part of the team. Her mum is a teacher and she was a geek while growing up, but she always understood the importance of an informal education. She loves learning by listening to other people’s experiences.

Although her main job is to provide content for our social media accounts, she also enjoys welcoming our attendees, recognizing regular faces and smiling to the new ones. Her favorite talk so far is the one Cinty Ionescu gave on ‘Broken’ because it combined multimedia content with a personal story.

Photos by: Adi Bulboacă.

After graduating from the Faculty of Theatre and Television of Cluj Napoca, Adrian Damian continued his studies at UNATC Bucharest, completing his scenography studies in 2010. He has signed so far over forty scenography projects in Romania for important theaters like Craiova, Cluj, Iași, Timișoara, the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj-Napoca, Targu Mureș, Sibiu, etc., working with top directors such as Radu Afrim, Radu Alexandru Nica, Peter Schnider, Roberto Bacci, Alexander Hausvater, Ada Lupu and many others.

A special place in his career takes the collaboration with director Mihai Măniuţiu, with whom he did 19 plays including ”Viața e vis” at the National Theatre in Timișoara, show nominated in 2013 by UNITER for the best scenography of the year, or ”Domnul Swedenborg vrea să viseze” at the National Theatre in Iași, named the best performance at the Theatre Festival in Oradea.

In 2014 he collaborated with director Robert Wilson as associate set designer for the play ”Rinocerii” at the National Theatre in Craiova, and in 2015 he collaborated on ”Tihna”, directed by Radu Afrim, a play that won the 2015 award for best performance at the Theatre Festival ”Atelier Sfântu Gheorghe”, and that was nominated for the best performance of the year by UNITER, and the scenography was nominated at the Theatre Critics Awards in Hungary.

In 2015 he was honored for his scenography by the Union of Artists, and he received the UNITER 2016 prize for the scenography of the play ”Cântăreața cheală”, performed at the National Theatre in Iași and directed by Radu Alexandru Nica.