UTAD Conference

Keynote Speech: ‘Dramatic Origins, Dynamic Process’

Professor Gilbert was educated in Australia and Canada, and has also worked at universities in Germany and Japan, focusing mainly on the theatre and performance of marginalised cultures. Her current passion is the study of arts-based activism in the age of the Anthropocene, particularly in relation to climate change and environmental justice. Over the last three decades, her research has spanned artistic works and practices drawn from diverse parts of the world, with special emphasis on contemporary theatre in Australasia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. Thematically, she concentrates on issues relating to human-environment interactions, race and representation, indigeneity, globalization, democracy, diplomacy and the politics and aesthetics of cross-cultural engagement. Theoretically, her work attempts to extend postcolonial and ecocritical analytical models to better account for performative praxis.

Zehra İpşiroğlu, who is a faculty member at the Department of Turkish Language Teaching at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, continued her studies at the German Department of Istanbul University Faculty of Letters between 1975-91, and at the "Department of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy", which she founded at the same faculty in the nineties. Nazan İpşiroğlu, Prof. within the Association for Supporting Contemporary Life. Dr. Jale Baysal and Prof. Dr. In addition to various imece books published in the field of creative education and training, which he prepared for publication with Şeyda Ozil, and various review articles and translations on literature, theater and education published abroad, he also wrote books on theater ("Realism in Incompatible Theatre"; "Revolution in Theatre"; "New Quests in Theatre" "; "Criticism of Criticism"; "Theatre Towards the Two Millennium", "Thoughtfulness in Theatre", "Nâzım Hikmet's Plays", "Reception in Theatre"), literature (Literature, Reception Dimensions and Variations; Contemporary Turkish Literature), education ("In Education" New Quests"; "Fear of Thinking", "Learning and Teaching to Think") and children's and youth literature ("Rhino Game"; "Talking Plane Tree"; "Let's Think Together Children", "Children Nowadays Are Still Wonderful"), memoir (" He has books on creative writing (From Today to Yesterday, From Yesterday to Today", together with Nazan İpşiroğlu). His short stories are "Places, Roads, Faces", his black comedy play "Pinocchio in the Country of King Übü", his essay novel, "Traces, Here and There" and his satirical novel "Children Nowadays Are Wonderful" by Aziz Nesin. The children's novel "Kids These Days Are Still Great" is his last literary work.

She graduated from Arnavutköy American Girls' College in 1961. She continued her education in the USA. She completed her undergraduate education at Parsons College Theater Department in Iowa, USA in 1964 and her master's degree in Theater Department at Texas Tech University in 1971 and returned to Turkey. Shw received her doctorate degree from Ankara University DTCF Theater Department in 1979.

After completing her doctorate, she took a break from her academic studies for a while. She wrote theater reviews in magazines and newspapers such as Akis, Kim, Dünya, Yön. In 1982, she started writing theater articles in Cumhuriyet newspaper. She has continued her writings in Cumhuriyet since then.

In 1990, she was among the founders of the Theater Critics Association. In 1993, she started working as a faculty member at the Department of Theater at Istanbul University. She gave lectures on introduction to theater criticism, applied theater criticism, comparative text studies, Turkish theatre, theories of criticism, and postmodernism in theatre. He received the title of associate professor in 1997 and professor in 2006 from Istanbul University. She served as Head of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy Department between 1997 and 2003. She launched the Refereed Journal of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy. She retired in 2008. [3] She has been a full-time faculty member at Kadir Has University, Department of Theater since 2013.

Apart from her academic studies, Gürün was the director of the International Istanbul Theater Festival between 1993 and 2013, organized 14 festivals, and was rewarded with the Istanbul Theater Festival Honor Award in 2014.[

She worked as Stage and Performing Arts Director at the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency for a while. Istanbul Universities Theater Festival (2008), Turkish Universities Theater Festival (2009) and the research titled Tradition Opening the Curtain from the Past to the Future (2011), which examines the theater venues of Istanbul, are among the projects she carried out during this duty.

She was the editor-in-chief of Theater Theater magazine for five years. She published books on theater. Theater Writings (2000) and Firebird Semiha Berksoy (2010) and Theater My Life (2015), which is about Yıldız Kenter's life, are her main books.

In 2020, a gift book titled "Essays to Dikmen Gürün" was published as a gift to Gürün, consisting of articles on her work as an academician and Istanbul Theater Festival director, as well as various articles and reviews of his colleagues, students and artists.

Founder and leader of Teatr ZAR, theatre director and actor; director of the Grotowski Institute; lecturer of the Ludwik Solski State Theatre School, Filia in Wrocław, President of the Board of Curators of the European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016 and Curator of its Theatre Programme. In 1999–2002 he carried out a series of expeditions to Georgia, Armenia and Iran, conducting research into the oldest forms of religious music of Eastern Christianity.