Alena Lysiakova is a queer, neurodivergent Belarusian writer with a journalism degree from Bulgaria, marketing scars from Russia, and a growing stack of German paperwork. She writes for games and television, but don’t worry, she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Her work? That’s a different story.

Alena’s career path looks like a world tour of “What Ifs.” What if you studied media in Bulgaria? What if you ran marketing campaigns in Russia while secretly sketching game plots in meetings? What if you spent years in the chaotic trenches of IT, gamedev, travel, and fintech, writing for everyone from tourists to tech bros? What if, one day, you finally admitted: “Actually, I just want to tell stories that hit people in the chest and maybe make them cry… or cackle”? Well, spoiler: she did.

Before her professional pivot to narrative design and screenwriting, Alena worked in content marketing and PR, leading creative teams and crafting everything from brand manifestos to full-blown campaigns. It taught her many things: how to sell an idea, how to write fast, how to make PowerPoint look like a revolution; but mostly, it confirmed that corporate jargon is just world-building without the dragons.

Eventually, she gave in to the chaos within and leaned fully into creative writing. Since then, she’s written over 100 LARP games, exploring identity, vulnerability, and emotional messiness in ways only pretending to be a time-traveling bisexual necromancer can deliver. She firmly believes that live-action roleplay is one of the best empathy-building tools ever invented, and perhaps an underrated alternative to certain parts of therapy.

Her writing often walks the tightrope between heartbreaking and hilarious, tackling themes like migration, queerness, family dysfunction, authoritarianism, love, and the desperate human need for connection. Think: bittersweet with a punch. Her characters cry, joke, run, love, spiral, and occasionally break the fourth wall. Just like life, but with slightly better dialogue and fewer meetings that could’ve been emails.

In 2025, Alena completed her MA in Serial Storytelling at IFS Internationale Filmschule in Cologne, where she developed several TV projects and worked in writers’ rooms across formats. That summer, she joined EarReality as a Narrative Design Intern, where she wrote five interactive audio stories, spanning sci-fi satire, fantasy quests, and dystopian dating disasters. Designing hidden choice structures and emotional payoffs while whispering into a microphone turned out to be her kind of party.

Now based in Germany, Alena continues to develop original series and narrative games while freelancing as a writer and narrative designer. Her portfolio includes branching narratives, TV pilots, dialogue trees, brand storytelling, and the occasional bit of copywriting with more personality than is strictly allowed by EU regulation. But don’t let the CV fool you, Alena is not all doom and drama. She is a strong believer in the holy trifecta of:

1. A well-timed sarcastic line.

2. Daily movement (hello, dopamine).

3. A stubborn refusal to give up, no matter how hard the level gets. That last one? Pure Belarusian DNA.

When she’s not plotting out emotional breakdowns for fictional people, she’s usually outside, doing yoga or walking her absurdly fluffy Pomeranian spitz named Besha. Alena tries to cook something new each month (with varying degrees of kitchen drama), and she’s always hunting for the next gem in whatever city she’s living in, whether it’s a jazz dive bar, a shadow puppet performance, or a game store that smells like nostalgia and risk-taking.

Her hobbies include collecting folklore, stalking obscure historical facts for character backstories, and being involved in projects that matter. She loves to bring new feelings into people’s lives through story, and into her own life through travel, culture, and the occasional wildly impractical hobby.

Alena believes stories are how we rehearse for life. And if you're going to rehearse, you might as well make it weird, wonderful, and just a little bit haunted.