Staff

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Management and Administration

Luisa Chiodi

Luisa Chiodi - Director

Luisa Chiodi has been the director of Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa since 2006. She holds a PhD in Social and Political Science from the European University Institute of Fiesole (Florence) and a degree in Political Science from the University of Milan. From 2003 to 2008 she was lecturer for the chair of 'Eastern European studies' at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bologna. She coordinated several research projects and is author of publications on civil society and transnational social dynamics. 

Chiara Sighele - Projects Director

MA in European Project Development promoted by the Europelago Foundation and the Italian Association of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions. Degree in Political Science from the University of Pavia. She has researched the role of Germany's Turkish community in relation with Turkey's accession to the EU. She has worked for the Immigrants' Integration office of the municipality of Konstanz, Germany, and in the Italian Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. She has been at Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso since 2007.

Rossella Vignola

Rossella Vignola - fund-raising and project manager

Master degree in International and Diplomatic Sciences from the University of Bologna, Forlì campus and post-graduate specialization in European design at the Venice International University. He is interested in the issues of migration, civil society, civic participation. At OBCT since 2014, she is a project manager, researcher and fund-raiser. Since 2019 she coordinates the European project INGRiD, Intersecting Grounds of Discrimination in Italy.

Chiara Cont - Events organisation and Administration

Degree in Cultural Tourism at the University of Ferrara. She has worked on youth policies, community-building activities and awareness-raising campaigns for the Autonomous Province of Trento from 2008 to 2011. In 2008 she also started working for  Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, where she is now full-time.

 

Editorial Board

Luka Zanoni - Editor in chief of the registered website

Post-graduate studies in History and Philosophy at the Bocconi University after a degree in Theoretical Philosophy from the University of Milan. From 1999 to 2005 he was an editor and translator for Notizie Est-Balcani and from 2002 to 2003 he carried out editorial work for the monthly publication Balcani economia. He is a journalist, speaks fluent Serbo-Croatian and has been working for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso since 2001.

Roberta Bertoldi - Editor and Content Manager

Roberta has worked in the field of on-line information focusing on social themes and human rights issues for many years. From 2001 to 2004 she has worked for Unimondo, the Italian branch of the international network 'Oneworld’. An expert in content management systems. She has been a part of the editorial staff of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso since 2005.

Nicole Corritore – Journalist and Press officer

From 1992 to 2000 Nicole worked in international and decentralised cooperation projects in Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia. From 1992 to 1996 she worked on external affairs for Radio Popolare Network. She is interested in environmental and cooperation issues. She is a journalist and manages relations with the Italian and South-East European media, as well as with the press offices of local bodies and institutions, NGOs, associations, etc. She speaks fluent Serbo-Croatian and joined Osservatorio in 2001.

Francesco Martino

Francesco Martino - Journalist

Degree in Media Studies from the University of Trieste. He worked in the field of international cooperation in Kosovo before becoming  a journalist. He has been living and working in Sofia since 2005 and in Bulgaria he has collaborated with various Italian and international media providers. He speaks Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian. Based in Sofia, he has been working for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso since 2006.

Paolo Martino - Filmmaker

After the degree in International Relations he lived in the Middle East, where he developed his passion for story-telling. He is author of short and medium-length films, but also reportages and articles focused on migrant peoples. He collaborates with OBCT as a videomaker and is author of the reportages Mussa Khan - The rebel Afghan and From the Caucasus to Beirut . He is on Instagram as www.instagram.com/paolo__martino

Ivana Draganić

Ivana Draganić -  translator

MA student in Social Citizenship and Interculturality at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, after a Master in Immigration from the same institution and a BA in Philosophy and History of Art from the University of Belgrade (Serbia). Her main research interests regard human rights, in particular migrant and minority rights. She has been collaborating with OBCT since 2015 as freelance translator from BCS to Italian and vice versa, and from English to Italian and vice versa

Research

Marco Abram - Senior Researcher

PhD in History at the University of Udine, Master in History of Europe at the University of Bologna. He spent research periods in different countries and worked for the Center for Advanced Studies - South Eastern Europe, the Department of History of the University of Rijeka and the University of British Columbia, where he was a lecturer of history of South East Europe. His research has been devoted to Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav history, and his articles have been published in several Italian and international academic journals. He was involved in many dissemination projects promoted by different organizations and has been collaborating with OBCT since 2009, mainly on projects focused on history, memory and the dealing with the past. He is a post-doc research fellow within the ERC project "Open borders: Cold War Europe Beyond Borders" at the ZRS Koper.

Dimitri Bettoni

Dimitri Bettoni -  Editor and Researcher

Researcher and project coordinator for OBC Transeuropa and Dublin City University, he has a PhD in journalism, security and surveillance. She works mainly on the intersection of journalism and the digital world, with a focus on human rights. In Turkey, he worked as a correspondent for OBCT, the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto and Atlante, the online magazine of the Treccani encyclopedic institute. Founding member of the Foreign Media Association in Turkey. 

Federico Caruso

Federico Caruso Researcher and journalist

MA degree in Political and Social Communication at the University of Milan, journalist since 2009, he attended the European Project Design course at the International University of Venice - AICCRE Centre. He has worked as a press officer for various public and private bodies, as well as for non profit organisations. Since 2011 he is in charge of journalistic communication tasks for the main Italian blood donors associations (AVIS) and he is editor-in-chief at Nurant Illustration Mag. He dived into data journalism as a self-taught student, in order to gain expertise in new practices and tools. He works for OBCT since 2019, contributing to the European Data Journalism Network and Panelfit projects.

Giorgio Comai - Senior researcher and data cruncher

PhD at Dublin City University, MA in East European Studies and degree in Political Science from the University of Bologna. He is an expert on post-Soviet affairs, with research focusing in particular on de facto states and on different approaches for the bulk extraction and analysis of textual contents form the web in this context. He is the author of a text-mining package for the R programming language. He is member of the board of directors of Asiac, Italy’s academic association for the study of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Exchange student at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, and Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Russia; he has been visiting regularly Russia and other post-Soviet countries since 2000. He speaks fluently Russian and Romanian. 

Irene DioliResearcher and translator

PhD in Diversity Management and Governance from the University of Bologna, MA in Eastern European Studies and degree in Translation from the same institution. She worked as a researcher within two projects of the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). She has collaborated with OBCT since 2006.

Gianluca De Feo

Gianluca De Feo - Editor and Researcher

After earning a bachelor degree in political, social and international sciences from the University of Bologna, he is currently pursuing a master’s degree in North American studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. He collaborated with Quorum/YouTrend as an editor and parliamentary researcher, and previously dealt with communication and social media for organizations active in the field of migration and coworking. He is particularly interested in international politics and environmental issues.

Serena Epis

Serena Epis - Editor and Researcher

Serena Epis is a master’s graduate in European and International Studies from the University of Trento. Since June 2021 she has been working as a research assistant for OBC Transeuropa on projects related to enlargement and civil society engagement. She was selected as a student of the Honours Programme Talete, an advanced training programme on the themes of global interdependence and international cooperation. She is particularly interested in civic participation and environmental issues. 

Lorenzo Ferrari  - Editor and senior Researcher

PhD in Political history at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies (Lucca), after a BA in Cultures and human rights and an MA in History at the University of Bologna. His main areas of expertise are European political integration and human rights; in 2016 he published the monograph Sometimes Speaking with a Single Voice. He has been working for years as an editor and author for publishing companies and as a collaborator of Il Post and VoxEurop. He works for OBCT since 2017.

Ornaldo Gjergji

Ornaldo Gjergji -  Editor and Researcher

MA in International Relations and European Studies and BA in Philosophy from the University of Genova. After some experience in NGOs such as Amnesty International, in 2019 started collaborating with OBCT as a data journalist within the “European Data Journalism Network” project. His interests are ethics, human rights, public opinion, and security.

Giuseppe Lauricella

Giuseppe Lauricella - Researcher

Historian of Economics, he collaborated with the Office for Historical Research of the Bank of Italy for a few years. Then, he worked as research assistant at the European University Institute and later in the History department of the University of Siena, developing and coordinating cultural history projects and creating several software applications for the management of databases containing digitalised historical sources. He also advised the Giunti publishing group on the application of digital technologies in publishing. He held teaching contracts in the schools of Economy and Literature of the University of Siena and in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Studies of the University of Modena.

Gentiola Madhi - Editor and Researcher

MA degree in EU International Relations and Diplomacy at the College of Europe (Bruges campus), after the MSc in International Relations at the University of Florence and the Advanced European Studies at the European College of Parma. Previously, she has worked with Albanian institutions, Italian local administrations and international NGOs. In 2018 she started collaborating with OBCT covering political and social developments in Albania. Since 2023, she works at OBCT as researcher and policy analyst on issues of enlargement, territorial cohesion and macro-regional strategies.

Fazıla Mat - Editor and senior Researcher

PhD candidate at the University of Victoria (Canada), she holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Milan. Fazıla's research focuses on Turkey, populism, fundamental rights, media freedom and civil society in the European context. She has been working for OBCT since 2008.

Sielke Kelner

Sielke Kelner - Researcher and advocacy officer

PhD in International History from the Geneva Graduate Institute. She completed her postdoc at Leiden University. Having worked on Romania´s migration diplomacy during the Cold War and the role of local and international civil society in influencing the collapse of the Communist regime, her research interests include Central and Eastern Europe, and the role of transnational actors in promoting democratic processes and human rights. She cultivates a passion for public policy as well and was a Blue Book Trainee at the EU Commission in 2019. Since 2022, she has been an OBCT researcher and advocacy officer focusing on the Media Freedom Rapid Response mechanism.

IT

roberto antoniazzi

Roberto Antoniazzi - Webmaster and System administrator

Degree in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Padua, he has worked as a project manager for various software companies. From 2001 to 2004, he was web manager for Unimondo, the Italian branch of the international network 'Oneworld’. In 2005, working in the field of open-source software, he was a co-founder of the company OpenContent. He has been webmaster and system administrator for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso since 2007.