Freelance reporter and nonfiction writer
Ada Petriczko is a journalist based in Warsaw, Poland. Her work has appeared in print and on-line in various publications, including: The New York Times, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Thomson Reuters and Gazeta Wyborcza. Over the past decade, Ada has reported breaking news and longform stories on human rights, social justice, politics, gender and culture across three continents. She is the author of reported features, interviews, profiles, op-eds, editorials, documentary photography and a narrative podcast.
Her most recent work includes a five-months-long investigation into the situation of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine for The New York Times, and a reported feature about Serhiy Sydorenko, a Ukrainian refugee and former world judo champion, who regained his eye-sight after 36 years of being blind, published in The Guardian.
In 2021, Ada was selected as the IWMF’s Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow from a pool of more than 100 applicants worldwide. During the fellowship, she reported for The New York Times and worked at the Opinion desk and the editorial board of The Boston Globe. She also conducted independent research on media freedom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies.
As a reporter at the Live desk of The New York Times, Ada covered the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, publishing 26 stories in 8 weeks. From 2017 to 2019, she covered Poland for the NewsMavens online news channel, focusing on the rise to power of the Law and Justice government and the impact of their policies on the state of human rights in the country.
Over the years of working not only as a freelance journalist, but also as a fixer for international media outlets, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Thomson Reuters, Ada has developed a rich local network, allowing her to quickly respond to major events in Poland.
Since the beginning of her career, Ada has traveled extensively, reporting not only from Europe but also South Asia and South America. She interviewed state leaders, Nobel Prize laureates, and Man Booker Prize-winning authors; she reported on social crises and marginalized communities.
From 2019 to 2020, Ada worked as a freelance foreign correspondent based in New Delhi, India, where she reported a non-fiction book about the 42 million women who are missing from the Indian population due to wide-spread sex-selection. During that period, she also wrote and gathered field recordings for the narrative podcast “The Living Goddess” for Vespucci Group, which featured Rashmila Shakya from Nepal, the former child Kumari goddess turned software engineer at Microsoft.
In 2018, Ada was nominated for “best feature writing” at the national journalistic competition “Wrażliwy” for a reported feature about the model and acid attack survivor, Reshma Qureshi.
Previously, as a fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation from Berlin, Ada led a team of reporters in a cross-border series “Witch Hunt”, which spanned Poland, Romania and Spain, and was published in multiple media outlets. She was also a co-author of Playbook. The Guide To Cross-Border Journalism, published by the foundation, for which she edited the chapter on ethics.
Ada began her career in 2014 as the online editor at Wysokie Obcasy, the iconic Polish magazine, which she had been reading since she was 13 years old. She holds degrees from Goldsmiths College in London, the University of Warsaw, and the Polish School of Reportage.