With a Ph.D. in Theater and Cinema Merve is a film & theatre director, screenwriter, actor, dramaturg, academician, and child rights activist.

As a woman and an artist born in Turkey who studied in Europe and lived in the US, her international identity has always figured prominently in all her creative endeavours. It has been for her that interpreting the problems of a region and culture close to her heart with this international perspective is the starting point of her films.

Merve Gezen, who focuses on children’s and women’s rights in her films and theatre plays, completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees in the theatre and cinema department at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She also completed her acting education at Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique de Paris. Prior to her PhD programme, she completed the ‘Child Protection: Children’s Rights in Theory and Practice’ certificate programme at Harvard University. Her PhD thesis is about representing child rights violations in cinema.

Under the roof of the DTM Pictures, she directed The Conversations of the Loo (2012), Where Are You My Love (2014), Scrabble (2016), and Speechless (2018) were shown in 5 continents and won many awards. Her last short film, Peripeteia, which talks about child labour, was shown in 25 international festivals in 5 continents and won 11 awards. Merve continues to write academic papers about cinema and theatre and teaches dramaturgy and directing classes at university. She is fluent in French, English, Turkish, Italian and Spanish, and has a basic knowledge of Greek, Latin, Russian and German.