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Istanbul native Defne Ayas is a curator and the director of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. She graduated from the Department of Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. After completing her master′s degree at New York University in 2003, she completed the De Appel Curatorial Program in Amsterdam in 2005-2006. Since 2004, she has been a curator and programmer of Performa, the biennial of visual art performance based in New York, where she has managed the programming and curatorial partnerships with a consortium of 80 + cultural institutions across New York City, and co-organized acclaimed projects and programs with an international roster of artists, architects, critics, curators, and writers from across the world.
Ayas is also the founding co-curator of Blind Dates Project (with Neery Melkonian), an artistic platform that is dedicated to tackling what remains of the peoples, places and cultures of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923). Under the title Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, thirteen new collaborative artistic projects including by Nina Katchadourian, Ahmet Ogut, Jalal Toufic, and Michael Blum-Damir Naksic were launched in 2010, together with a series of related public programs which began two years prior to the resulting exhibition, providing a rare platform, particularly in the North American context, for both artists and non-artists.
In 2007, Ayas worked as a director of programs of the Prince Claus Fund Partnership of Arhub Asia and as an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai. In 2010, She served as a curatorial advisor to the 8th Shanghai Biennial (China) and as a publication advisor to the 8th Gwangju Biennial (South Korea). In September 2012, Ayas co-curated the 11th Baltic Triennial to great acclaim, as well as the Istanbul and Bandung city pavilions as part of the Intercity Project of the 9th Shanghai Biennial (with Charles Esche and Davide Quadrio). Ayas was a nominee for ICI’s Independent Curatorial Vision Award in 2012. She currently lives and works in Rotterdam.
Reference: rhizome.org, wdw.nl, deappel.nl
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