Elena Bauer

Elena Bauer (she/her) was born in Siberia in 1991 and grew up in Swabia. She graduated with a diploma in directing from the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy in 2022 and previously studied general rhetoric and philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where she researched the possibilities of 360-degree cameras in documentary film and their influence on directors and audiences in her bachelor's thesis in 2016.

She is a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dokumentarfilm (AG DOK) and the Verband für Film- und Fernsehdramaturgie (VeDRA) As a director, author and dramaturge, Elena has not only realized and accompanied documentary, short and animated films - her heart also beats for interactive media and immersive formats that challenge traditional narrative styles. With an eye for innovative storytelling, she is always on the lookout for ways to push media boundaries.

For JOIN THE COMFORTZONE, she chose a mixture of visual novel, point & click and browser game in which you have to repeatedly make unpleasant decisions under time pressure in a dystopian dictatorship. The project began as an attempt to find a creative answer to the tendencies that corrode democracy, was developed with young people and teachers and is now used in school lessons. The game was developed by Elena Bauer for the Baden-Württemberg Youth Foundation and implemented with Spoonful Games, the Center for Didactic Computer Game Research at the University of Freiburg (ZfdC), various freelance artists and with the support of the federal program “Demokratie leben!” and the initiative “Lernort für Demokratie” and has already been nominated for the Tommi children's software prize in the “Jugendpreis Bildung” category before its release.