One of her grandmothers Maria Sutitch participated in the Bulgarian National Revival (which called for the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire) and fought under the leadership of revolutionary Georgi Benkovski.

In the same year she joined the diplomatic corps at the Bulgarian Embassy in London, UK where she was in charge of the legal affairs.

Following the end her husbands term as president in 2002, Stoyanova went to work as a lawyer at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland.

[1][2][3] In 1978, as a trainee at the Plovdiv Regional Court, she met her future husband Petar Stoyanov.

A native speaker of the Bulgarian language, Stoyanova also speaks German, English, French and Russian.