Janna Brancolini is a Non-resident Fellow with the Digital Innovation Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

She is an independent journalist based in Milan, Italy, covering legal affairs, business, technology, and sustainability for Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times. Her essays and photos have also appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Business Insider, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. As an accredited foreign journalist in Italy, she moderates events for the Foreign Press Association and serves on the jury of the Globo d’Oro Italian film awards. 

Brancolini first moved to Italy in 2014 on a Fulbright fellowship to research the impact of criminal libel laws on freedom of the press. Her work has also investigated legal protections for atypical creative works and explored whether the concept of freedom of speech should be expanded in the digital age. In 2015, she visited Sarajevo with the University of Bologna and Johns Hopkins University to report on constitutional development and rule of law 20 years after the Bosnian War. 

Brancolini holds a J.D. with a specialization in international law from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and a BA in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She has lectured on journalism and law at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and the University of Bologna in Italy. She is the author of the forthcoming book Breaking the Surface: The Extraordinary Life of Honor Frost and the Dawn of Underwater Archaeology, from St. Martin’s Press, blending history, science, and art to narrate the story of one of the world’s first female Scuba divers.