Elena Trencheva is a member of the FilmEU Steering committee. She is the dean of the Screen Arts Faculty at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts “Krastyo Sarafov”, Bulgaria, since 2022. She is also the head of the BA programme in Production design and the MA programme in Design for interactive audiovisual products. She teaches courses such as Costume Design for Film, Previsualization and Storyboarding, and Visual Design since 2003.
She actively works as a production designer and costume designer in numerous Bulgarian feature and documentary films, web series, and sitcoms. In 2007, she defended her doctoral dissertation Semiotics of Costume in Science Fiction Film, which won a competition for scientific research by the National Culture Fund and was published as From Metropolis to The Matrix in 2009.

From 2013 to 2015, as a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, she conducted research on the Representations of Finnish Identity in Early Finnish Cinema 1919-1929 and in 2016, she presented her habilitation thesis Violating Accuracy or Costume Verisimilitude in Historical Film.
Elena participates in various academic forums and is the author of research articles, published in Bulgarian and foreign-language editions.