Alexenia Dimitrova

Alexenia Dimitrova is a Bulgarian journalist and author with more than 21 years of experience. She works in the second largest daily in Bulgaria 24 Hours (24 chasa). Her favorite topics are secret archives of the Cold War era, shadow affairs and corruption, money laundering, suspicious ownership and property, and secret societies. Recently she has profiled finding lost people all over the world and reuniting them. For her series of publications about missing persons which started in July 2002 and still continues (published about 100 parts of it), she received Chernorizets Hrabar (the most prestigious award for investigative journalism in Bulgaria) in November 2004. She had been nominated for the same award in 2003.

Dimitrova has published more than 4,000 stories in 40 media in Bulgaria, the USA, Russia, and Great Britain. Her book The Iron Fist - Inside the Bulgarian and American Secret Archives was published in March 2005 in London and in English by Artnik Publishing. The same book (under the title The War of the Spies) was published in Bulgaria in October 2005.

Dimitrova graduated from Sofia University in 1986 and has specializations on journalism in the World Press Institute, St. Paul, MN, the University of Missouri, Columbia (USA), Reuters (Great Britain), European Center for Journalism (Netherlands), and Danish School of Journalism in Archus. Mrs. Dimitrova is licensed lecturer in journalism - magor journalistic investigations - in Bulgaria within the framework of SouthEast European Network for Professionalism in the Media. She was also a local trainer for the BBC on investigative journalism during a 3 year project implementing the Self regulation and the Code of Ethics of Bulgarian Media. She is one of the 12 members of the Press Complaint Commission in Bulgaria.

Dimitrova has been invited to speak at seminars and other events of investigative journalism or to conduct training for meed career jurnalsits in Denmark, Croatia, Netherlands, Moldavia, Armenia, Slovenia, Germany, Bosnia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Austria and Turkey.

She is a member of the union of Bulgarian journalists, the Investigative Journalists Association; International Federation of Journalists (IFJ); and is a founding member of South East European Media Organization (SEEMO).