Ioana Cristina Casapu (b. Romania) is a Berlin-based author whose work has appeared in over 30 anthologies and magazines in English and Romanian. She made her debut in 2016 with the novel Deviații de Stereo (Casa de Pariuri Literare, Bucharest), which was published in 2019 under the title Heart Beats: A Memoir of The Millennial Generation on Social Media. Her writing explores migration, feminism, social ruptures, loneliness in European metropolises, and global culture, and has been published in outlets including DAZED, Thought Catalog, Goethe-Institut, Berlin Art Parasites, DILEMA, and Stadtsprachen Magazin.
She has curated international art projects and multidisciplinary exhibitions; her work has been featured in over a dozen solo and group exhibitions across Europe.
Her artistic practice is grounded in making the voices of FLINTA* as well as exiled and war-affected communities visible, while strengthening democratic societies. She has worked extensively on these themes for the Goethe-Institut, the Innovation in Politics Institute, and as a social worker at an NGO providing a crisis hotline for youth and women affected by sexualized violence. She is represented by Hilgemann.Art Gallery.
In 2024, she founded FLINTA* Literatur, Berlin’s platform for FLINTA* authors with migration or refugee backgrounds. Her goal is to develop this platform into a fully funded, community-run public resource, creating socially conscious, accessible, and safe spaces for writers, cultural practitioners, translators, and language activists.
Her latest book, Berliner Tagebuch. Die Geschichte meiner inneren Mauer (translated from Romanian by Gundel Große) will be published on September 26, 2025, by KLAK Verlag.
Books and contributions to anthologies (fiction & nonfiction)
2025 – Berliner Tagebuch: Die Geschichte meiner inneren Berliner Mauer (fiction, essays), KLAK Verlag, Berlin, German translation by Gundel Große
2022 – NOI 2 | WIR 2 – Deutsch-rumänische Duos im Porträt, (nonfiction, anthology), Goethe-Institut Bucharest, texts by Ioana Casapu, Venera Dimulescu, Manuela Klenke, Diana Meseșan, and Anne Reinert.
2021 – Innovation in Politics - 50 Creative and Courageous Political Projects, (nonfiction anthology), Vienna
2024 – Litehouse Vol. 1 (poetry anthology), Lisbon; contributor.
2020 – Otherwise Engaged: A Literature and Arts Journal Volume 5, Quarantine Edition (literary journal, poetry anthology), contributor
2019 – Heart Beats - A Memoir of The Millennial Generation on Social Media (novel, translated and adapted into English by Ioana Casapu from Deviații de stereo), Casa de Pariuri Literare, Bucharest
2016 – Deviații de stereo (novel), Casa de Pariuri Literare, Bucharest
Other published writing
2025 –
“When the World Crisis Meets the Personal Crisis” (poetry), Girls and Queers To The Front #12: FIRE, Warsaw
“Ghostwriter,” (fiction, essay), Stadtsprachen Magazin, April issue “There Will Be Beauty in Everything,” (fiction, essay), Stadtsprachen Magazin, June issue, Berlin
2024 – “A dead sister at the Red Sea” (Ro: O soră moartă la Marea Roșie), “Corseted by Heritage” (Ro: Încorsetată de patrimoniu), “On remembrance and forgetting” (Ro: Mulțumesc pentru recunoștință, mulțumesc pentru uitare“, (essays), DILEMA, Bucharest
2024 – „Un cineclub feminist ce îndeamnă la o privire profundă asupra feminității în film” (opinion), Observator Cultural, Bucharest
2020–2023 – Author of the column Jurnal de Berlin, fictional essays, Goethe-Institut Bucharest
2021 –The Political Power of Disability, Locate Victims Beirut Saves Lives, A Heart-Centered Approach to Politics, Effective Altruism as a Driver of Change in a Post-Pandemic World, opinion, Innovation in Politics Institute,Vienna
2021 – Contributing writer, Lustery Magazine, Essays, Berlin
2020 – Contributing writer, TAST Magazine, Poetry, Zürich
2020 – Co-author, “A/Part of Me”, ein Schreib- und Bildhauerprojekt, das die Isolation während der Corona- Pandemie dokumentiert, poetry anthology, winner of the Residence Scena 9 Societe Generale working stipend, Bucharest
2018 – Contributor, C-Heads Magazine, short fiction, Berlin
2016 – Author, The Anatomy of Depression, nonfiction, Thought Catalog, New York
2016 – Author, Mourning The Intense Loss of Female Friendships in Adulthood, nonfiction, Thought Catalog, New York
2015 – Author, My Pubic Hair, a Tell-Tale from Goya to Stoya, essay, Art Parasites, Berlin
Selected readings, exhibitions and curatorial activities
Since 2024 – Founder and curator, Girl, Show Me That Body (of Work), FLINTA* Literatur Berlin
2024 – Group exhibition, Sequences Photography Festival, Ploiesti, Romania; Group Exhibition, POSITIONS Berlin, Hilgemann.Art
2024 – Reading, Ghostwriter, Essay, Poetic Hafla, Lettrétage, Berlin
2024 – Reading, When in doubt, look for a butterfly, Essay, Convergence I, Lettrétage, Berlin 2023 – Exhibition, POSITIONS Berlin, Hilgemann.Art
2022 – „NOI 2 | WIR 2 – deutsch-rumänische Duos im Porträt“, exhibition launching the book with the same title, Romanian Cultural Institute Berlin
2022 – “Wild at Art”, Group exhibition, Text/Art Installation, “I Have Lost All My Battery in You”,
Hilgemman.Art, Berlin
2022 – “Art in Context 4” Group exhibition, Text/Art Installation, “I Have Lost All My Battery in You”, Diploma - Combinatul Fondului Plastic, Bucharest
2021 – "Wholy Mother", Group exhibition, Text/Art Installation, Strata Gallery, Bucharest
2021 – "Love Lost, Miami Art Basel", Text/Art Installation, Group exhibition, Strata Gallery, Bucharest
2020 – “Heart Spaces", Solo exhibition, Text/Art Installation, Monopol, Berlin Art Week
What brought you to Berlin? Love? World politics? Or was it a coincidence?
A poem I wrote brought me to Berlin, in September 2015. It is perhaps one of the most fortuitous accidents of fate that “sealed” my journey and permanence in the city. I had submitted several poems to the former Berlin Art Parasites magazine throughout early 2015, and that summer they offered me a job as managing editor, along with a relocation package to move to Berlin. I had never planned to live here, nor did I feel drawn to Berlin before. So I am one of those few people who arrive somewhere without ever having been a tourist in that city.
I still remember the arrival: it was a warm September day, the sun painting everything in glowing sepia hues. I was listening to Mazzy Star on my earbuds as I landed at Tegel Airport. It made me think of the past, the future, and the many memories I was yet to make. From that first moment, I never wanted to leave. Despite having lived here for ten years and watching so many people come and go, I remain. Berlin can be brutal, and yet I find it deeply romantic—especially in autumn. I still love it for everything it has given me, and despite everything it has taken away. It is my home now, where I finally found a room of one’s own, overlooking a city and a society in constant change, and where—despite setbacks—I always found creative freedom and reconciliation with myself.
What do you love about Berlin?
A song says most major cities are built on the foundation of a love affair—whether with a person, a community, or the city itself. Love that breaks through boundaries, beyond politics and borders, finding belonging—and freedom. Berlin was not built on such enchanting premises, yet I find this sentence true for my ever-changing relationship with the city.
In Berlin, you have to do everything yourself. After a few years, it becomes routine—the constant dance of finding another apartment, another mattress, another pair of jeans. You lose weight in the process. Some acquaintances who have never lived here boast, “You like to fight. This place pushes you away. So why stay?” Maybe they’re right, in a way—giving up comfort is always difficult. And yet there is a kind of hardship here that becomes comfortable in itself. Carrying seven boxes and three handbags up and down the stairs, moving every few months or years, accumulating stuff in each temporary palace—much of it lost, thrown away, sold, or given away. Seventeen mismatched socks, the packet of coffee bought the day before moving, a scarf, a pair of tweezers, a spare mailbox key—all gone. But perhaps that loss is itself a gift.
My relationship with Berlin, and my writing about it, has dealt intensively with memory—its loss, and its recovery. “There is a Berlin Wall in each of us,” I wrote in my book Berliner Tagebuch. Die Geschichte meiner inneren Mauer (KLAK Verlag, 2025, translated by Gundel Große)—asking how we can reunite our fragments, bring home the missing people who live within us. Moving abroad is always a matter of choice, but also of fate, and of how we can influence our destiny in positive ways. Living here, I learned who I was and who I wasn’t. I tore down that wall—or at least, I like to think so.
What do you miss in Berlin?
My parents and their garden.
What is your favorite spot in Berlin?
Many of the places I loved and wrote in have vanished under the pressure of the economy: Café Bar Marietta, Zum Starken August, Café Neues Ufer (where I particularly enjoyed writing, knowing David Bowie once spent time there), and Clärchens Ballhaus in its old days.
These days, some of my favorites are Lettrétage, the Weinerei Forum, and the pond in Weinbergpark, where a beloved heron resides.
Would you say you are a different person in Berlin? A different translator? And if yes, in what way?
Interestingly, thinking and writing in different languages brings out different parts of one’s personality. Berlin is a very saturnine city—it can be harsh, and sometimes forces you to develop parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. I do not miss Romania itself, but I do miss aspects of the life I built there before moving in 2015.
The challenges I faced in Berlin accelerated my maturity—a process I see reflected in many of my friends who also live here. In Berlin, I can no longer be a child most of the time. Life as a migrant has a harshness to it that will break you if you don’t embrace it. You have to fight for everything, no matter how small. That fight makes you tough and humble—but not necessarily tame. Yet in the places where I grew up, I can still be a child, a teenager, a daughter—and above all, gentle.
Which existing literary work do you wish you had written?
The one I am currently writing—a novel.
