Çiğdem Selışık Onat

Çiğdem Selışık Onat — Biography

Çiğdem Selışık Onat is an actress, director and acting teacher whose theatre career spans Turkey and the United States. Alongside her work on stage and screen she taught theatre and acting for nearly forty years. She has won the Golden Orange for Best Supporting Actress.

After Robert College she entered the Faculty of Letters at Istanbul University, where she was among the founders of Genç Oyuncular, a movement that brought together young stage actors from different schools. She worked at the Kenter Theatre and the Ankara State Theatre, then took a master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and continued with a doctoral programme in comparative drama there. In the United States she acted in and staged plays at Lincoln Center and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts; as Signora Fioria in The Time of the Cuckoo she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2000. In Turkey she directed for the Istanbul City Theatres. She taught at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and at Tisch, and for about four years gave acting and drama courses at Koç University.

In 2017 she played Süreyya in Ferzan Özpetek's Rosso Istanbul and Firdevs in Yavuz Turgul's Yol Ayrımı. She also appeared in the series Hakan: Muhafız, played Seferiye Hatun in Uyanış: Büyük Selçuklu, and Neriman in a Show TV series.