Freelance Journalist @adapetriczko @ada_petriczko
Ada is a freelance journalist and foreign correspondent from Poland, covering women’s rights, social justice and culture. As a contributor to the country’s major liberal daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and the iconic feminist magazine, Wysokie Obcasy, Ada specializes in long-form journalism, particularly narrative features and interviews. She also collaborated with Vespucci Group, Are We Europe and Przekrój among others. Since the beginning of her career in 2014, Ada has travelled extensively, reporting from India, South America and Europe. She interviewed state leaders and Man Booker Prize-winning authors; she reported on social crises and marginalized communities. However, a common thread through her stories have always been women. Between 2017 and 2019, Ada served as an editor at NewsMavens – the first European newsroom run entirely by women, to counter the underrepresentation of female journalists in the media industry. As the curator of Polish news, she covered the impact of the current government’s nationalist policies on the state of women’s rights in Poland. In the meantime, Ada led an international team of journalists in a cross-border reporting series Witch Hunt, exploring women’s rights through the theme of modern and historical witch hunts. The project was supported by the Reporters in the Field grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation and was published in multiple media outlets. For the past two years, Ada reported on gender and women’s rights from the Indian subcontinent. Among the subjects she covered were acid attacks, honour killings, sexual violence and child marriage. She was based in North India, researching Missing Women - a narrative, non-fiction book and a series of reported features about the 45 million women who are missing from the Indian population due to widespread sex selection. The project was supported by the IWMF and will be released by Gazeta Wyborcza and the Agora publishing house. Lately, Ada has been experimenting with podcasts. For Vespucci Group, she created a narrative audio story, The Girl in Red, about Rashmila Shakya from Nepal, the former Kumari goddess turned activist and software engineer. Ada is also the co-author of Playbook, the guide to cross-border journalism published by the Bosch Foundation, for which she edited the chapter on ethics. In 2018, she was nominated for “best feature writing” at the national journalistic competition “Wrażliwy” for the story of the model and acid attack survivor, Reshma Qureshi. Ada graduated from Goldsmiths College in London, the University of Warsaw and the Polish School of Reportage. Currently, she is based in Warsaw.
