Born in Ankara in 1985, I am an art historian, curator, and writer specializing in global modernisms and contemporary art, with a focus on the Middle East and the Gulf. I received my PhD in art history from the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT in 2022, and I hold a combined BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Columbia University. I live between İstanbul and Abu Dhabi.
I am currently working on a book manuscript based on my dissertation that examines the articulations of modern painting from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. I also teach in the Teaching Artist Fellowship Program run by the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi. Between 2023 and 2025, I was at New York University Abu Dhabi, serving as curator of the NYUAD Art Gallery and as a research assistant professor in the Humanities Division. Before that I was an assistant professor at Sabancı University’s Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design program.
As an art historian, my interests include late Ottoman visual culture, global modernisms, exhibition histories, transnational artistic and intellectual encounters, and moments of confluence between art and architecture. As a curator, my practice ranges from archive-based exhibitions and monographic projects to collection activation and new commissions, including performative work. I work mostly with living artists, especially from the Middle East.
In 2019–2020 I served as curator at the İstanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (IRHM), together with Vasıf Kortun. While we failed to re-open the museum on our own terms, this short-lived attempt gave me precious access to the institution’s collection and archives. Earlier, I worked at SALT in Istanbul between 2010 and 2014, a five-year period during which I learned how to think about exhibitions, institutions, and archives. This formative period still informs my curatorial and academic practice.