Nazli Dinçel

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Nazli Dinçel is a first-generation immigrant to the United States from Turkey. She primarily works with camera original film, a deteriorating organic matter similar to her own body. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation, and desire with the film object: its texture, color, and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Her use of text as image, language, and sound imitates the failure of memory and her own displacement within a Western society. Dinçel’s practice has also recently shifted into making sculptures that use film material and traditional rug making.

Dinçel is working on the post-production of her new experimental documentary The Systems of Touching, about the politics and history of weaving told through the bodies and personal experiences of women in her family. She is researching methods and editing techniques that can convey the labor of rug making.

Dinçel holds an MFA in filmmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has won awards and exhibited worldwide in institutions, festivals, and microcinemas, including the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, she received the 2018 Helen Hill Award at the Orphan Film Symposium and was awarded a 2018 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the emerging artist category.