Seçil Yaylalı is a visual artist with a background in city planning (BA), industrial design (MA), and visual arts (MA). Her practice is concentrated on participatory and socially engaged art. She realized projects with different disadvantaged social groups: forced migrants in Diyarbakır, Ramallah, psychiatric patients in Novara, teenagers in Alexandria, Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, migrant workers in Beirut, street vendors in Turin, inhabitants in Aarhus. In each project, she aims to create an environment to create together according to the specific needs/wills of participants. She often collaborates with local artists/associations to be able to make the projects sustainable. Yaylalı is part of BIS team and the co-founder of PASAJ artist initiative that runs a project space and a residency in Istanbul which concentrates on communications and relationships with its surrounding. She taught contemporary art and basic design at Istanbul Technical University.

İpek Altun obtained her bachelor's degree in Psychology and her master's degree in Media and Visual Studies from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. To date, her research and work experience have proceeded predominantly in the field of creative industries. Within this scope, she has contributed to the studies that convey the work lives and experiences of creative communities from different perspectives. She continues her studies at the Communication Sciences doctorate program of Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.

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Zeynep Okyay works as a cultural manager on the development of artistic projects and networking of cultural actors/organizations. Since 2010, she mostly works in the field of contemporary visual arts and carries out her curatorial and research-based works under the roof of PASAJ and amberPlatform. She is one of the co-founders of PASAJ independent art space based in Istanbul that collaborates with social communities and hosts project exhibitions, workshops, and talks. Okyay focuses on the relationships between artists and communities, and the contexts in which the two meet within a specific location and time. In her research practice, she uses the dictionary form as an instrument to pursue social structures, sharing of knowledge and experience through vocabularies, in an attempt to create new forms of expression within present conditions. Lately, she has initiated the “solidarity dictionary” project to investigate the ways the term is used within the contemporary art scene in Turkey. 

Nil Mutluer (PhD, Comparative Gender Studies, Central European University) is a social scientist, and occasional journalist, TV programmer and consultant for civil society and art projects.  She thinks and writes on a gender, sexuality, ethnicity, belief systems, migration, memory, nationalism and everyday life and is an advocate for rights and freedoms. Works and acts in the intersectional space of civil society, among academia, and media and arts. She is currently affiliated with Leipzig University, Institute of Religion Studies as a Senior Researcher and EUME (Europe in the Middle East) - Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as a Research Fellow. Lives in the transnational space between Berlin and Istanbul. She calls in-betweenness home.

Leila Haghighat is a cultural worker based in Berlin, who studied cultural and political sciences at Université Paris VIII Vincennes/St. Denis. From 2013 to 2017, she was the coordinator for cultural education at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where her research focuses on socially engaged and participatory art in the context of gentrification. Specifically, she studies knowledge production in art and cultural education as well as the ways that art, space, politics, and society relate and interact with one another. Leila Haghighat teaches on the topics of body, space, and representation and is a member of bildungsLab*, a collective of feminist migrant academics who comment, intervene, and publish in the field of critical education. Together with María Castro Varela she is editor of the upcoming anthology „double bind postcolonial. critical perspective on art and cultural education“.