YCP 2025 Fellow
Çisemnaz Çil
From the landscapes of Türkiye
Current Practice
Senior undergraduate student in American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, aspiring filmmaker and curator with an interest in independent cinema and visual culture.
Bio
Çisemnaz Çil’s work engages feminist theory, queer studies, and intersectional approaches to literature and cinema, focusing on how visual culture and narrative forms challenge power and embodiment.
She has written for Bağımsız Sinema and High on Films and currently contributes as a writer for Musée Magazine. A former intern at TED University’s Center for Gender Studies, her published work includes essays in Ampersand Journal.
She aspires to expand her practice toward filmmaking and curatorial work, situating her voice between theory and art.
Focus Areas for Exploration
Curiosity centers on how criticism can become a form of slow witnessing rather than verdict.
Drawn to questions of spectatorship, silence, and the political weight of looking, there is a wish to explore how art—especially film and photography—builds fragile spaces where memory, geography, and identity collide.
This program feels like a site where the solitary act of seeing might be unsettled by collective practice, where others’ ways of looking fracture inherited certainties.
There is an eagerness to test whether criticism can move beyond description into something porous, collaborative, and transformative, leaving room for ambiguity to speak.