Story and creativity have always been central to Elena's life – but at university, she was told that people like her didn't play the types of characters she aspired to. Rather than accept these limitations, Elena found her mission: if the industry couldn’t imagine stories with characters who looked like her, then she’d create them herself. This determination propelled Elena through a master’s in TV production and onto both The Network Talent Scheme and the PACT Indie Diversity Training Scheme. Starting as a production runner, within two years she’d become a script editor, working across a number of productions including I Hate Suzie, The Rising and Treason, before shifting in-house to development. Today, Elena thrives on working with writers from the earliest spark of an idea through to wrap and beyond. A confessed obsessive TV watcher, Elena is still thrilled by the fact that creativity and imagination are a daily part of her job. She loves the puzzle of storytelling – how structure, character, and tone come together to form something emotionally true and utterly watchable. A producer once dismissed Elena’s television ambitions with a withering assessment: she couldn’t even make a decent cup of tea. But Elena is stubborn, detail-obsessed, and deeply driven. Proving the nay-sayers wrong has only ever been part of the point as she continues to champion diversity in front of and behind the camera. (True story: her tea remains undrinkable.)