EBRU NIHAN CELKAN

Ebru Nihan Celkan began her acting education at Sadri Alişik Theatre in Istanbul in 2005. She appeared in productions over the next two years, and in 2007 her first play, From Heaven to Hell was staged as part of the Sadri Alişik Theatre Festival. She has since written more than nine plays, as a well as a short screenplay — works which treat such subjects as domestic abuse, workers’ safety, PTSD, transgender issues, environmental dystopias, and political assassination. They have been widely performed throughout Türkiye. For example, both Triggerman and Shells with Surprises have been included in the repertoire of State and City Theaters; Home! Sweet Home! was staged continuously for two seasons in Istanbul and toured many Turkish cities; It Was the Day after a Day in which No One Died played for three seasons in various cities in Türkiye. In 2011, she founded the theater company, BuluTiyatro (Cloud Theater). Honors and awards include Best Playwright of the Year in the 7th Direklerarasi Audience Awards of 2012; an invitation to the Emerging International Playwrights Seminar by Sala Beckett – L’Obrador Dramaturgy Institute in 2011; and the screening of her film, 10, 9, 8 . . . in the Aksanat Short Film Festival. In 2017 she was one of four international playwrights invited by the Literary Colloquium Berlin, the Maxim Gorki theater, the New Institute for Dramatic Writing, and the Robert Bosch Foundation to participate in the “War in Peace” project. She was a Jean Jacques Rousseau Fellow of the Academy Schloss Solitude Stuttgart in 2019. In the same year, her play Will You Come with Me? had its European premiere at Schauspiel Stuttgart, and in 2022 it was staged by PlayCo in New York. Her most recent work, “Loop” premiered in 2024 at the 28th Istanbul International Theater Festival and continues to be staged in Türkiye.