Mehmet Kıvanç Gökmen

He was born in 1985 in Bursa, Turkey. In 2003 he started studying at the Faculty of Communication of Marmara University. Between 2005 and 2007, he spent one year in total in the USA to improve his language skills and experience the feeling of living abroad. After his return to Istanbul he started working at the communication agency of Sakıp Sabancı Museum and SALT. Later he started working for the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) at media relations department, and later for the Meetings on the Bridge, the market section of the Istanbul Film Festival. Together with the prominent intellectual, writer and translator Ahmet Cemal, he established ACKA (Ahmet Cemal Culture Academy) and organised workshops. He was one of two founding managers of Koro Ses at which he was also a choir singer. For two years he frequently wrote reviews and dossiers for the art magazine Istanbul Art News. In 2015, in order to expand his academic knowledge on art management, he enrolled to Arts Management Master’s Program at Yeditepe University. During this period at the program he also studied at the Cultural Encounters department at Roskilde University (Denmark) as a visiting student. After completing all necessarily courses he left his education at the Yeditepe University without delivering his thesis, which is required for the formal coalition of the program, and he shifted his interest to plastic arts. He started staying at the Fine Arts Facility of Düzce University, where he currently writes his master’s thesis under the supervision of Prof. Ferhat Özgür. Since its founding in early 2016 to July 2018 he was in charge of The Pill gallery (Istanbul) as the associate director. Additionally, he had been receiving singing lessons for 6 years and singing as a chorist in polyphonic choir as well as various rock bands. He also prepared and presented a radio program named ‘progressive hour’ for a non-profit radio. Edited several books concerning culture and arts, which were translated from English to Turkish.