About

Whether as a creative and therapeutic process (in my own agenda), as a personal passion (translated into poetry), or in my work after university, as a journalist – writing has always been an important part of my life.

In 2006, in my first year at the Faculty of Journalism (University of Bucharest), I decided to enrol as a volunteer to the ambitious bilingual student newspaper in Bucharest, The Bullet. There, I’d gotten the chance to work under the kind guidance of a passionate and talented Reuters journalist and author, Alan Elsner. I contributed to bringing to life the last edition of this internationally funded project, while learning hands on and better than in any classroom, the ABC of reporting.

After this enriching experience, for the next seven years, up until 2012, I’ve been working in 4 newsrooms in Bucharest: the online newspaper Front News; the bimonthly printed HR magazine “Cariere” (Careers); the business magazine Money Express; and the business/corporate devision of Sanoma Hearst team.

Not long after starting my work with the Money Express magazine, out of my own stress and external pressure, I’ve encountered the most challenging situation in my life so far: writer’s block. And for an entire month, I couldn’t write anything. I was desperate, stuck and I almost got fired.

In the end, what saved me was valuable mentoring and support from two wonderful Editors, Ionuț Ancuțescu and Elena Nicolae, and the discovery of visual thinking.

In my search for solutions I found out about mind maps and how to use them to better plan my ideas, my work, my life. This tool unlocked my creativity, boosted my writing process and then enabled me to take further the learning points into my next chapter.

In 2010 I started to slowly leave journalism, and moved towards content marketing and communication. I started working a lot on creating descriptions, presentations, promotions, posts on social media, newsletters and more.

During almost 4 years I’ve been a freelancer and collaborated with several private companies, helping them to better communicate, promote their services and grown their online presence.

All this experience contributed further on when, in 2015, I started organising and coordinating the Romanian edition of the experiential workshop The Liberated Voice. Since then, the workshop reached 7 editions in Bucharest and gathered more than 300 participants.

At the same time with my work as a freelance content marketing professional and communication specialist, I’ve been doing coaching on writing.

Starting 2010, during a period of almost 5 years, I’ve been intensely working with several authors of blogs and writers to support them in their writing adventure, as a coach, consultant and editor, applying the best lessons from my previous experiences, including the use of mind mapping as a solution for writer’s block.

Both copywriting and coaching on writing, even though they ceased being my focus, still are some of my best skills and occasionally use them in my current activities.

As a communication specialist with Life After Work, a company developing out of the box learning experiences for employees, I had the opportunity to meet Cristina Dinu-Popa and fall in love with the impact her work had on children. This is how, in 2012, a new chapter began: together, we founded JuKaVa.

This project focused on developing experiences for children in a way that would trigger and enhance their emotional development. For almost 7 years we’ve been organising numerous workshops, parties, special events and camps for children, all of them focused on bringing a new dimension into kids’ activities: personal development though play and non-formal learning.

As the role of visual thinking was growing in my work and life, in 2012 I’ve heard for the first time about and interacted with a surprising concept: graphic recording – the process of listening to a conversation, understanding the main ideas and concepts and translating them into drawings that, put together, make a comprehensive and relevant visual brief.

This practice and process seemed so innovative, fresh and inspiring, that I couldn’t help myself being magnetised by it.

After it started as a solution to my writer’s block, visual thinking and visualisation proved to be a central source of meaning and became the main focus in my work.

As a natural consequence, after 6 years as a freelance Graphic Recorder, in 2018 I founded Picturise and started to put up a team that could deliver and be part of bigger and more complex projects.

Picturise became the first company in Romania fully dedicated to visualisation, delivering until now more than 300 projects across Europe in the shape of multiple services: graphic recording, graphic facilitation, visual storytelling, animated videos, visual facilitation workshops and more.