My name is Andrea Chalupa. I’m a journalist and producer in New York. For Big Think, I write Purpose, Inc., a business column for artists.

My mother and father were born in displaced persons camps in 1945 Europe. The hellish machine of the Soviet Union that their parents escaped has been one of my major preoccupations for the past decade, leading me to discover a priceless “gift” from George Orwell in our family. This is the subject of a lecture I gave at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. I expanded the lecture into "Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm," with a beautiful cover illustrated by Molly Crabapple. A screenplay I wrote inspired by my grandfather’s Soviet memoir and this little known history of Orwell and the refugees is currently in development in Europe.