Ana Maria Luca is a Romanian award winning journalist currently working with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and is a contributor to European feminist magazine News Mavens. Until 2016, she spent seven years and half based in Beirut covering regional politics for various regional, international and local media outlets. She studied Journalism at the University of Bucharest and holds an MA in International Affairs from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, where she specialized in radicalization and sectarian conflict. In 2004 she won the special prize of the jury for long feature in Freedom House “Young Journalists of the Year” competition and in 2007 she was awarded the second prize in ”Writing for Central and Eastern Europe” for a feature on children left behind by migrant workers.