Welcome to my personal website, which contains my blog and portfolios from different activities: journalism, translation, research, and creative arts.
- Selected articles for Lithuanian and international media are posted in this portfolio; new updates on my journalistic activities are posted here.
- On this website, you can also find my visual arts portfolio.
- Key information about my research activities is on this page.
- Policy research highlights are listed here.
My preferred social network is LinkedIn. You can find me here. Second-best is Mastodon — find me at @daivarep@dju.social. I keep Twitter and Facebook accounts, but don’t post as enthusiastically.
Bio
The first occupation I ever tried out was that of a graphic novelist – before it was cool. Before I learned to write, I used to draw illustrated stories with all the letters I knew at the time, in speech bubbles. Whenever anybody showed enough interest, I would narrate the story. Growing up, I wanted to be a forester, a translator, a physicist and an heir to a famous TV host, who would sit with a cup of tea and explain the world every week.
My teenage dream was to learn Japanese and live in Japan. With some determination, I reached out to the only Japanese teacher at the time and he was kind to allow me to join his class. Already a student, I was selected to represent Lithuania in one of two European youth groups invited to a Study Tour for European Youth in Japan. In spring 2009 I received another opportunity, this time as a visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo. The experience resulted in two academic publications and a series of articles for the newspaper I was working for at the time. Soon after I got a scholarship to spend an academic year in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I was a research student at Tel Aviv University and volunteered for the African Refugee Development Center. I learned Hebrew quickly and later used the experience for very interesting tour guiding gigs with Travel Planet.
As an 18-year-old, I gave in to social pressure not to choose journalism as my major, but less than two years later I got a dream job at a local newspaper, Atgimimas. The newspaper didn’t survive the economic crisis, but since then I have been published in The Financial Times, The Guardian, Politico and elsewhere. After several years of writing features, editing, and podcasting, I am now mostly an investigative journalist, with an aim to transition into data journalism full-time.
In search for a good place to live and start an international career, I planted myself in Luxembourg (as a translation and communication trainee at the European Parliament, DG Translation) and Malta (first as a migration and hate speech researcher at an NGO, then as a freelance researcher and writer). My multiple careers and personal interests allowed me to visit 40 countries on four continents (including all EU countries) and learn to communicate in six foreign languages. I continue searching for opportunities to be able to spend most of my time working in my areas of interest. I have translated a number of non-fiction books from English to Lithuanian.
Finally, briefly in 2008, and then more earnestly in 2013 I resumed drawing and painting studies, a passion that I dropped at the age of 11. I have a certificate from Accademia Italiana in Florence. In 2017 I also started taking creative writing classes, and in 2020-2021 I studied creative non-fiction writing at the University of Cambridge. My goal is to start publishing non-fiction books.