İsmet Ergün

İsmet Ergün — Biography

Her short film Bende Sıra, which she wrote and directed herself, brought İsmet Ergün an honour at the 2007 Locarno Film Festival and the "Best German Film 2007" award at Berlin's Interfilm festival the same year. Born in Konya and living in Berlin since 1972, the painter and stage designer has worked on theatre sets and costumes and, in film, as an art director and production designer.

She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts as a guest student, trained as a teacher between 1976 and 1980 and taught for six years. After 1988 she acted in the city's immigrant theatre scene and appeared in Kemal Sunal's Turkish-language comedy Polizei, learning stage design with Andrej Woron in the same years. Her first theatre jobs were as a direction and costume assistant at Teatr Kreatur, and with Woron she worked on costumes and masks for a staging of The Blue Angel at the Theater des Westens. From 1994 to 1997 she handled equipment and costumes for Terre des hommes television productions, and in 1996 she worked on a staging of The Threepenny Opera in Bremen. From 1997 to 1999 she was Sinan Çetin's art director on Propaganda and on the parts of Kanak Attack shot in Turkey. In her collaboration with Neco Çelik she was production designer on Urban Guerillas (2003), and in 2005 she designed the sets for The Rose of Stamboul at the Neuköllner Oper.

Her paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and Turkey since the late 1980s.