Angela Jansen has a Bachelor Cultural Anthropology and a Master International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam with a specialization in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Since 2008 she has worked with several non-government organizations in the Netherlands, Haiti, Cameroon and DR Congo which focused on peacebuilding in conflict or disaster affected settings. From the start of her career, she has been committed to promote and facilitate bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, which build on the existing knowledge and experiences of the communities and focus on the nexus between peacebuilding, mental health and psychosocial wellbeing.

In 2013, Angela started working with community-based sociotherapy (CBS) in Rwanda. She has been involved in program management, project development, knowledge exchange and initiating innovative research designs. In addition to that, she facilitated trainings on Monitoring and Evaluation in the context of CBS in different countries including DR Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda. In line with her work for CBS Rwanda, she conducted a study focusing on identity formation among genocide perpetrators and contributed to studies about the intergenerational legacies of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Angela is also a PhD candidate at the Center for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, studying the intergenerational legacies of violence.