Dr. Pelin Aytemiz Karslı is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Visual Communication Design in the Faculty of Communication at Yaşar University. She received her Ph.D. from Bilkent University with a dissertation titled Representing Absence and the Absent One: Remembering and Longing Through Mourning Photography. Her research focuses on visual culture, vernacular photography, photographic materiality, and digital media, with particular attention to memory, death, everyday life, and the intersections of tradition and modernity in Turkey. Alongside her academic work, she also produces short films and narrative projects. Her award-winning short film Forget Me Not (2019), together with her publications, reflects her ongoing interest in photography, visuality, memory, and loss. She is also engaged in archival culture, found photography, and collaborative social projects (such as; alternative education) in both academic and public spheres.

Dr. Ürün Yıldıran Önk completed her M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2011) at Dokuz Eylül University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was appointed Associate Professor in 2022. Since 2007, she has been a faculty member at Yaşar University’s Department of Radio, Television and Cinema, where she teaches at both undergraduate and graduate levels and currently holds the position of vice dean. Beyond her academic duties, she contributes to the coordinating team of the CONTACT International Student Film Festival and participates in various internationally and nationally funded projects. Her recent research focuses on television genres; notably, she coordinated ‘New Screen New Dizi,’ a project examining Turkish serials on OTT platforms. Her scholarship includes numerous articles, conference papers, and book chapters spanning television, cinema, and media history.

Burcu Dabak Özdemir completed her PhD at the University of East Anglia with a dissertation titled Being Tourist in Geographies of Power. She holds master’s degrees from Kadir Has University and SOAS, University of London. In 2023–2024, she conducted postdoctoral research at HFF Potsdam-Babelsberg with a TÜBİTAK scholarship, focusing on Turkish film festivals in Europe. Dr. Özdemir is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communication, Yaşar University. She is the author of Cross-Dressing in Turkish Cinema: Politics, Gender and National Trauma (I.B. Tauris, 2021) and Experiencing National Culture Abroad: Turkish Film Festivals in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Her award-winning documentaries, including Yerin Ruhu (2023) and Yersiz Yurtsuz (2009), alongside numerous scholarly articles, explore themes of memory, space, gender, and cultural identity.

Doruk Türkmen is a designer and academic whose work focuses on the intersection of interaction, play, and meaning. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Yaşar University, İzmir. His research investigates emergent meaning in interactive systems, with a particular emphasis on games and playful artifacts as sites of experiential and cultural production. Adopting a research-through-design approach, Türkmen explores how interaction and play can generate new forms of understanding, engagement, and interpretation. His doctoral research, conducted in the Design Studies Program at İzmir University of Economics, centers on the design of role-playing games within the context of archaeology museums, examining how digital and hybrid game experiences can enrich museum engagement by mediating cultural heritage through meaningful play. Through this work, he contributes to interdisciplinary discussions spanning design research, game studies, and museum studies, while also developing experimental prototypes that bridge theory and practice.

Tulay GORU DOGAN is a faculty member in the Department of New Media and Communication at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Communication. She holds a PhD in Distance Education and an MA in Visual Communication Design from Anadolu University. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence literacy, media education, and digital learning environments. She is interested in how digital technologies, particularly AI and platform-based systems, are increasingly embedded in everyday life and shape communication practices and learning experiences. Her earlier work explored the use of infographics in learning and the role of social media in education. More recently, her research has expanded to include user experience (UX) design, computational thinking, and AI-supported learning environments. Her academic interests include educational technologies, AI in education, and the design of innovative learning and communication systems.

Gizem Kızıltunalı Sonyol is an Assistant Professor in the Department of New Media and Communication at Yaşar University, Türkiye. She holds a PhD in Media from Manchester Metropolitan University, where she also taught for four years. Her research brings together critical cultural communication, visual culture, and media studies to examine how power operates through images, materiality, and everyday cultural forms. She is particularly interested in the politics of gender, identity, ideology, and cultural memory, and in the ways visual and symbolic regimes shape visibility, legitimacy, and value across media, fashion, and material culture. Across her work, she explores how cultural meanings are negotiated, authorized, and transformed, and who has the power to determine what they mean. Her research pays particular attention to the relationship between representation and symbolic authority, asking how images and objects become invested with social meaning, how aesthetic arrangements naturalize hierarchy, and how acts of interpretation are bound up with broader struggles over recognition, value, and cultural legitimacy.

Dr. Simge Gökbayrak is a faculty member in the Department of New Media and Communication at Yaşar University, where she has been teaching since 2019 and working full-time since 2022. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema and Television from Anadolu University with a dissertation titled *The Cyborgized Human as an Inevitable Social Reality and Cyborg Art*. Her research focuses on digital storytelling, new media practices, posthumanism, cyborg art, and technology–society relations, adopting an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. Alongside her academic work, Gökbayrak has extensive experience in the creative industries, having worked as an assistant director and director in advertising, cinema, television, and music video productions since 2005. She has contributed to nearly 200 projects and continues to bridge academic knowledge with practice-based production. Her short films İz (2011) and ID (2008), for which she served as director, producer, and screenwriter, have been screened and awarded at numerous national and international festivals, including selections at Cannes and Berlinale. In addition to her teaching and research, she actively contributes to university–industry collaborations, serves as a jury member at film festivals, and has been a board member and industry advisor at EkoFilm – Sustainable Production Platform since 2024.

Batu Aytemiz is an AI Engineer and researcher based in Istanbul, specializing in the intersection of machine learning and game design. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2022). His research focuses on designer-centered reinforcement learning and AI-assisted tools for videogame inclsivity. Previously, he served as a Research Scientist at Agentic.ai and held visiting research roles at Microsoft Research Cambridge and Ubisoft La Forge.

Emir Ali Senger is a dedicated media professional and Master’s student with extensive experience in video production, photography, and media management. Currently serving as a Research Assistant at Yaşar University, specializing in visual communication design while pursuing advanced studies in visual culture and disaster communication. Proven track record of managing production teams, coordinating international NGO projects, and developing creative content for diverse platforms.

Prof. Dr Eylem ATAKAV (EN)Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and world cinema; gender and Middle Eastern media, and documentary. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married – an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey; and co-director of Lifeline, a documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic. She is currently completing a new documentary about migrant victims/survivors of domestic violence in England.

Gökçen Başaran İnce received her PhD in 2010 from Ege University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Journalism, with her thesis entitled "The Press in the Process of Social Remembering/Forgetting: The Conception of the Republic in Our Collective Political Memory". She continued her postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, with a TÜBİTAK scholarship. Her main areas of interest are collective memory studies, national identity construction and ideology, news/communication, and the sociology of everyday life. Her current work focuses on themes of nostalgia, the construction of collective memory in everyday life, and the 'field of journalism' within the context of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism, Faculty of Communication, Ege University.

Özge Baykan Calafato is an academic, curator, and writer based in Amsterdam. She is Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches in the Literary and Cultural Analysis program, and at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, where she lectures on archival studies. Her research focuses on photography, archives, migration, cultural memory and transnational histories. She is the author of Making the Modern Turkish Citizen Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (Bloomsbury, 2022). Since 1999, she has worked as a writer, journalist, editor and translator for several magazines focusing on photography, literature, cinema, and music. Between 2008 and 2013, she worked for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) as Programming Manager. Between 2014 and 2020 she was the Assistant Director for the Akkasah: Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi, co-establishing a large vernacular photography collection from West Asia and North Africa.

She currently works as an associate professor at Dokuz Eylül University (Izmir/TURKEY), Fine Arts Faculty, Department of Film Design and Directing, where she completed her PhD in 2014. She was a visiting researcher at the University of St Andrews, Scotland (Department of Film Studies, 2011) and at Stockholm University, Sweden (Department of Media Studies, 2021). She teaches courses on film and style, project preparation and producing in cinema. Director’s style, Turkish Cinema after 1990s, representation in film, film production strategies, film festivals, European co-productions and film policies are among her research interests. She took part in the organization teams of various film festivals, served as a jury member and curated short film selections. She has been a team member of the International 2 Sides Short Film Festival since 2019. She has served as an assistant director and editor for various short and feature films. She is currently developing and directing her own short film projects.

(Porto, 1974) lives and works in Porto, Portugal. She is an artist, researcher, and lecturer. Her work explores the materialisation of the concept of flow through visual arts, seeking to give visibility to that which, while present, remains invisible. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art from Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra; a Master’s degree in Museology and Cultural Heritage from the Faculty of Arts, University of Coimbra; and a BA in Fine Arts – Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto. She is a full member of CIEBA and a research collaborator at ID+ at ESMAD. She is a professor at the School of Media Arts and Design, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, and at the University of Aveiro.

João Leal is a practice-based researcher, visual artist, and photographer whose work operates at the intersection of contemporary photography, visual culture, and critical inquiry. His practice explores themes such as perception, temporality, landscape, and the everyday, often through long-term photographic projects and collaborative work.

He has exhibited extensively in international contexts and is actively involved in artistic research through exhibitions, publications, and conference presentations. His work engages with both artistic production and theoretical reflection, positioning photography as a critical tool for thinking about contemporary visual experience.

João Leal collaborates with Mark Durden through the platform Durden & Leal, producing research-driven photographic work and publications. He is a full integrated member of ID+ (Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture, University of Aveiro) and is also affiliated with research activities at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto.

His practice represents a strong example of practice-based research, combining artistic production with conceptual and research-oriented approaches to photography.

Deniznaz Kemerli is currently pursuing her second Master’s degree in Communication at Yaşar University, Türkiye. She completed her undergraduate education in the Department of Public Relations and Advertising at Yaşar University, and subsequently earned her Master’s degree in Gender and Women’s Studies at Dokuz Eylül University. Her academic research focuses primarily on feminist and queer theory, gender and representation, media and cultural studies, the politics of visibility, and discourse and ideology. In parallel with her academic journey, she continues her professional career as a Marketing Manager, working with brands, non-profit organizations, think tanks, and research centers on the development of their brand and communication strategies. The reciprocal interaction between her academic background and industry experience enables her to approach communication not merely as an application-oriented field, but also as a critical area of study embedded in ideology, power, representation, and the production of cultural meaning.

Emre Haçan is an Izmir-based photographer and a PhD student in Communication at Yaşar University. His work navigates the intersection of artistic practice and theoretical inquiry, situating creative production within a critical and methodological framework. He holds an MA in Media and Communication Studies from Galatasaray University, where his thesis, titled “The Phantasmagoric Display of Meta-Abundance: Consumer Culture and the Manifestations of Spectacle at the Izmir International Fair as a World Expo Prototype (1950–1980),” interrogated the urban space as a communicative field shaped by the convergence of consumerism, spectacle, and ideology . Haçan’s interdisciplinary practice spans photography, text, collage, and installation, engaging with personal archives, everyday life, and visual culture as primary sites of meaning-making . Within this framework, diaries serve as a fundamental component of his inquiry, functioning both as a literary form and as a methodological tool for arts-based research. By utilizing found images and objects, he constructs alternative narratives that explore the complex relationships between identity, the body, and social norms—with particular emphasis on the politics of visibility, representation, and belonging. His project "Half-Naked in the Desert of Social Morality" was recognized at CREA OPEN 2026 in Venice, where it received the Special Mention for Artistic Quality.