Dzana Brkanic

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Detektor Deputy Editor

Dzana joined the BIRN team in May 2013. She has been working as a journalist since 2005 after beginning her career as a reporter for Radio Free Europe. Since December 2019, she has been Deputy Editor in BIRN BiH.

She has worked as an editor and journalist for several media outlets in Bosnias, including the daily newspaper Dnevni Avaz, TV Sarajevo and Alfa TV, researching and reporting on politics, the economy, crime, culture and other issues.

Before joining BIRN, Brkanic worked as communications officer for the Media Intelligence Agency (MIA), becoming a PR specialist with in-depth knowledge of the media scene in Bosnia and the region. She graduated in journalism at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo.

Brkanic is the author of two documentaries: Underground, about a war hospital built four meters below ground in Olovo during the war, where more than 500 babies were born and hundreds of lives saved; and Four Walls, about the reduction of rights of LGBTIQ persons in BiH and the region, as well as attacks by right-wing and extremist organizations against members of that community.

She contributed to a film, Journalism Is not a Crime, as a director, and also acted as a researcher on two films about missing persons and victims of wartime sexual violence produced by BIRN BiH.

In recent years, she has worked as a trainer for young journalists and students at numerous workshops on reporting on victims, missing persons, reporting from court and investigative journalism. She has participated in many conferences as a panelist.

She won the European Union Investigative Journalism Awards for her investigation into non-transparent collection of humanitarian funds for the construction of wells and mosques in Africa in 2021, and, as a co-author, for a research of hate crimes in 2023. As member of BIRN BiH newsroom, she won the Special Award of the European Press Prize in 2020 for “efforts and success in securing justice for war crime victims”.