Faculty / Ayrin Ersöz
Ayrin Ersöz
Ayrin Ersöz is a choreographer and dance scholar based in Istanbul. Born in Bulgaria, where she first trained in classical ballet, she danced with the CRR Dance Theatre Company and Istanbul Dance Theatre until 2007. Since then she has worked as an independent choreographer for stages in Türkiye and across Europe.
Her productions include Frozen Dream, an immersive dance-theatre work made with American choreographer Julia Ritter for the 19th Istanbul Theatre Festival, and Epimeleia Heautou, a piece on Foucault’s “care of the self” presented at the 20th Istanbul Theatre Festival. Internationally, she created The Entrance with Krakow Dance Theatre (Cricoteka, Kraków, 2019), a work about the European refugee crisis.
Ayrin is a Professor in the Department of Music at Yıldız Technical University’s Faculty of Art and Design. There she teaches dance and performance theory and body culture in Islam and modernity, and supervises doctoral research. Her research looks at how dance relates to political ideologies and systems, past and present, with a particular focus on gender, Islam and the moving body. Her work has appeared in Dance Chronicle and The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance.
Her international academic work includes a long collaboration with Rutgers University in the United States. She was a guest artist at the Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2012 and a Fulbright Research Fellow at Rutgers in 2016–2017, where she studied how Islam shapes young Muslim women college students’ views of dance and their participation in it. She also developed and taught online dance courses for Rutgers Arts Online, which gives her extensive experience in teaching dance online.
Degrees
- Ph.D., Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy, Istanbul University
- M.A., Art and Design, Yıldız Technical University
- B.A., Dance, Faculty of Art and Design, Yıldız Technical University
Courses with GOE
- Dance in the Muslim World OnlineBeginner level, 1 of 3 · Part of the International Dance Certificate. In development.
Faculty keep the rights to the courses they create. GOE licenses them to institutions and credits the author on every course.