Dr. Gurur Ertem is a sociologist, dancer, and dance/performance studies scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from The New School for Social Research (New York) with the dissertation “The EUropean Dance: The Emergence and Transformation of a Contemporary Dance Art World (1989-2013).” She has been immersed in the contemporary dance culture for two decades as a dancer, dramaturge, scholar, educator, and curator. Ertem curated the iDANS Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance (Istanbul 2006-2014) and edited several books on dance such as Dance on Time (2010); Solo? In Contemporary Dance (2008), and Yirminci Yüzyılda Dans Sanatı (2007). At present, she researches and writes on politics of/with the body and the affective and aesthetic enunciations of the “political” with a focus on recent social movements and corporeal resistance. Her recent publications include ​Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement (co-edited with Sandra Noeth, Passagen, 2018);   “Gezi Uprising: Performative Democracy and Politics of the Body in an Extended Space of Appearance” (in Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity; Routledge, 2018). Ertem’s trans-disciplinary work combines the arts, social, and political theory. She was Humanities Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, 2018) and Fellow for the Hannah Arendt Seminar at The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (2018, New School for Social Research, New York). Ertem has served as a jury member for the German Dance Platform 2020 and the Goethe Institute, International Co-Production Fund. Ertem is currently Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Freie Universität (Berlin 2020-2021) with her project "The Exilic Condition and the Arts."  Besides teaching at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts (Department of Dance) and Boğaziçi University (Department of Sociology), Ertem is a professional trainee of the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® - Movement Based Expressive Arts Therapy and Somatic Education. She lives in Berlin and Istanbul.