About me
Culture, children and outdoor education — where I come from and where I am going.
My name is Meda Andreea Căpîlna and I live in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In public I go by the shorter name, Meda Căpîlna; on pages without Romanian diacritics my name may appear as Meda Andreea Capilna. I work as a speaker and as an event planner for children, and in my head these are not two separate jobs: both are about building a setting in which someone understands something they did not understand before.
This is not new for me. At 15 I was already organising flashmobs and poetry evenings in Târgu Mureș, and at 17 I co-founded a youth association that ran educational events around the town — among them an outdoor event with concerts and workshops. In 2019 I was featured in DoR magazine’s “19 under 19” series. I mention it not as a credential but because it explains why I talk about events as a craft rather than as an idea.
I arrived here through culture. Art, music and cultural events were my first territory — not a weekend hobby, but a way of reading the world. I spent a lot of time around events: how a programme is built, how a room keeps its attention, what separates an event people attend from one they talk about afterwards. When I started working with children, I found the questions were the same, only the stakes are higher: children do not pretend to enjoy something.
The thing that moved everything most was volunteering at a marine conservation centre in Thailand, working with sea turtles. I went thinking I would help some animals and came back with a lesson about patience and about scale of time. Conservation has no spectacular moments. It has feeding, cleaning tanks, measuring, writing things down, day after day, for a result you may never see yourself. That is where I understood what it means to be part of something longer than you are — and how well that translates for children, if you hand it to them to do rather than teach it to them.
At a glance
- Full name
- Meda Andreea Căpîlna
- Public name
- Meda Căpîlna
- Based in
- Cluj-Napoca, Romania
- Work
- speaker, children's events and workshops
- Training in progress
- Forest School Teacher and pedagogy
- Languages
- Romanian and English
Information updated 4 September 2026.
From volunteering at a marine conservation centre in Thailand.
What matters to me
-
Children do, not watch
A good event is measured in what a child touched, built or attempted — not in how well they sat still.
-
Unstructured time
Boredom is not a gap to be filled. It is the space where a child’s own play appears, and the best part of learning comes out of it.
-
Nature as the classroom
Outside is not a reward that follows the lesson. It is where the lesson has context, real risk, and consequences children grasp immediately.
Independent public sources
These editorial pages document public work that predates medacapilna.ro.
What I do with it
-
The training above shows up most clearly in what I run for children:
activities for children in Cluj -
The same principles at the scale of a class or a kindergarten group:
workshops for schools and kindergartens -
And when I am invited to speak, this is what I speak about:
what I speak about -
Where my work has been covered:
press appearances
Want to work together?
Tell me about the event, conference or programme you are working on.
Write to me