DrHelen Vatsikopoulos

Dr Helen Vatsikopoulos is a Walkley Award winning journalist who has worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australia Network, and for the Special Broadcasting Service.

In a career spanning 30 years she has worked on programs such as the ABC News, the Midday Report, the 7.30 report, Dateline, Lateline and Foreign Correspondent. In that time she has specialized in International Reporting and has covered history-changing events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, the Rwandan Genocide, the HIV-Aids crisis in West Papua, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, and the Bali Bombings- among many others. Her reporting on the collapse of the USSR won her a coveted Walkley award.

Helen has presented many studio-based television programs including Face the Press, News Extra, Talking Heads and Dateline for SBS; The 7.00 pm News and the Midday Report for ABC1 and Asia-Pacific Focus for the Australia Network. She has also made three documentaries: New World Borders for SBS and the award-winning documentaries Agatha's Curse for SBS and Getting Gehry for the ABC.

In 2011 Helen moved from industry into academia. She has taught into the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation which is part of UTS' teaching journalism. In 2014 she was awarded an Erasmus Mundus scholarship to City University London and also at Aarhus University Denmark where she guest lectured. She was visiting scholar and guest lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki Greece and guest lecturer at Jonkopig University Sweden.

Her style of teaching students journalism often incorporated external partners facilitating engagement and practical experience. Partners have included: Western Sydney Parklands and Parramatta Park Trusts in a multimedia project reporting diversity in Western Sydney; UTS Social Justice and Inclusion and its Glebe Connect project reporting on indigenous and lower socio-economic communities; the Head On Photo Festival where student photojournalism was exhibited to an international audience and the Judith Neilson Institute and its Community Voices diversity program.

Helen completed her Doctorate of Creative Arts in 2018 it was a exegetical investigation on identity and nationalism with an autoethnographical memoir. She is currently updating and writing more for publication.

She is a regular public speaker and facilitator at conferences, literary festivals and community events on issues of multiculturalism.

Helen has co-curated three exhibitions: The New Normal on Rural Communities and Rwanda; 30 years after the Genocide for the Head on Photo Festival and The Greeks of Tashkent, a Soviet Archival research project for the South Australian History Festival.

Helen completed her Doctorate of Creative Arts in 2018 it was a exegetical investigation on identity and nationalism with an autoethnographical memoir. She is currently working on this for publication.

Helen's interest in diversity of storytelling and diasporic studies led her to set up the Greek-Australian Writers' Festival in 2022 , as part of the Greek Festival of Sydney showcasing books by Greek-Australian 1st to 3rd generation authors and others writing on Greek themes. The literary event has been running for 5 years and is about to launch in Adelaide. 

Hellenic Dreaming is her first anthology; a multidisciplinary collection of 1st to 3rd generation academics, writers, photographers and professionals documenting their experiences in multicultural Australia. The book was launched in Sydney and Athens at the Australian Embassy. A Greek publisher has secured the rights to translate and publish it in Greek.

Helen moved from teaching to an Honorary Professional Fellow Status in 2022. 

Her research interests include: identity, nationalism, memory studies, historiography, autoethnography, video journalism, literary journalism, diversity in storytelling and  diasporic writing.

She is a regular public speaker and facilitator at conferences, literary festivals and community events on issues of multiculturalism.