Deniz Başar

• https://concordia.academia.edu/DenizBaşar

Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker and two-time national award-winning
playwright from Turkey. In 2014, she received one of the most acclaimed playwriting
awards in Turkey (Mitos-Boyut theatre publishing agency’s annual contest) for her play
The Itch, which was published in the award winning collection of that year. She lived and
worked in Canada between August 2014 and December 2020, and during this time she
took part in multiple productions in Toronto and Montreal as a dramaturge, puppet maker
and playwright. In these years she was awarded grants and residencies for her plays like
Genius to the Other and Wine and Halva. In 2016, she won the Derbent Playwriting
Contest, which was a collaboration project between Iranian and Turkish independent
theatre artists, with her play In the Destructible Flow of a Vast Monolithic Moment, and
her play was translated into Persian. This play was later performed as a stage reading in
the 2019 Revolution They Wrote Feminist Theatre Festival in Montreal. Parts of her
research were included in anthologies like Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race
(2021), and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations by Routledge
(2019). She recently finished her PhD in Concordia University’s Humanities Department
with her work on contemporary Turkish theatre, entitled “A Dismissed Heritage:
Contemporary Performance in Turkey Defined through Karagöz”. Currently she is an
FRQSC post-doctoral fellow, and continuing her research projects in Istanbul.

Photo Credit: Halime Aktürk