Daiva Repečkaitė is an investigative journalist at Amphora Media.
Daiva’s work has been published by the Financial Times, The Guardian, Politico and OCCRP.
The first occupation she ever tried out was that of a graphic novelist – before it was cool. Before she learnt to write, she used to draw illustrated stories with all the letters she knew at the time, in speech bubbles. Whenever anybody showed enough interest, she would narrate the story. Growing up, she 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.
Her teenage dream was to learn Japanese and live in Japan. With some determination, she reached out to the only Japanese teacher at the time and he was kind to allow her to join his class. Already a student, she 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 she 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 she was working for at the time. Soon after she got a scholarship to spend an academic year in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she was a research student at Tel Aviv University and volunteered for the African Refugee Development Centre. She learnt Hebrew quickly and later used the experience for very interesting tour guiding gigs with Travel Planet.
As an 18-year-old, she gave in to social pressure not to choose journalism as her major, but less than two years later she got a dream job at a local newspaper, Atgimimas. The newspaper didn't survive the economic crisis, but since then she has been published in The Financial Times, The Guardian, Politico and elsewhere. After several years of writing features, editing, and podcasting, she is 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, she planted herself 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). Her multiple careers and personal interests allowed her to visit 40 countries on four continents (including all EU countries) and learn to communicate in six foreign languages. She continues searching for opportunities to be able to spend most of her time working in her areas of interest. She has translated a number of non-fiction books from English to Lithuanian.
Finally, briefly in 2008, and then more earnestly in 2013 she resumed drawing and painting studies, a passion that she dropped at the age of 11. She has a certificate from Accademia Italiana in Florence. In 2017 she also started taking creative writing classes, and in 2020-2021 she studied creative non-fiction writing at the University of Cambridge. Her goal is to start publishing non-fiction books.
