Hi, I’m Dana Filek-Gibson. I’m a writer, editor and communicator with nearly a decade of experience pitching, researching, fact-checking, writing and editing content for a range of print, digital and social media outlets. I’m currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

My writing career began in 2010 when I bought a one-way ticket and moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I had just graduated with a degree in writing, literature and publishing. My first freelance gig was a monthly column about expat life for a local print magazine.

In 2012, I bought a $200 bicycle and travelled through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Not long after, I landed a guidebook-writing gig. For the better part of a year, my days were spent diving into Vietnamese history, culture, cuisine and tourism. These experiences became Moon Vietnam, which was first published by Avalon Travel in 2015.

Back in HCMC, I put away my bike for a while and took on a variety of freelance projects, working as a project editor for an inflight magazine and publishing stories on travel, arts and culture, food and fashion in outlets throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

As the shift toward digital hit Vietnam’s English-language media, I took on the editor-in-chief role at Saigoneer, one of the country’s largest English-language websites. There, I worked with a talented, passionate and diverse team to tell multimedia stories about art, culture, history and contemporary Vietnam.

Eventually, family brought me back to North America, and I arrived in Toronto in 2018. Since then, I’ve worked as a copy editor at Global News and am currently associate editor at Canada’s National Observer, where I work with a top-notch team covering climate change, federal politics, environment and more.