Joana pursued her studies in Communication Design in the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Lisbon, where she focused on multimedia, videography and photography.

Joana works both as a freelance writer, and a designer/researcher. As a writer she published a book in her native Portugal in 2006, smaller stories in several publications, and won her share of writing awards. She recently finished writing her third book - Dialogues to the End of the World.

As a designers her most mentionable experiences were at Lisbon's Lomographic Embassy, and as a event producer at Experimenta Design 2005. In both this areas she had a lot of experience.

After graduating she moved to Berlin for an year, where she joined the Social Design Site non-profit. There, she also bumped into The Table of Free Voices and dedicated a rainy Summer to hearing her way through some of those 700 hours of footage. Still looking forward to the film.

She is currently between Lisbon and Berlin and trying to get to Buenos Aires. Between writing and researching and trying to get to - well, let's see what comes up next...

Her main drives are meeting commited people, working in teams, travelling, developing multidisciplinary project, where she can learn from fields and mind-set different from hers. Her main topics include sustainability, systemic change, media activism, peace journalism, corporate responsible design, local economies, permaculture, and a huge "etc".