Şeyda Çetin is a curator and cultural manager based in Istanbul. Her curatorial practice is focused on research-based exhibitions with an intersecting approach mainly between art and archaeology, photography and history, gender and art history. She is a founding member of Meşher, a prominent exhibition space in Istanbul established by the Vehbi Koç Foundation in 2019. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibitions Istanbul as Far as the Eye can See: Views Across Five Centuries (2023), Alexis Gritchenko: The Constantinople Years (2020) and conducted curatorial affairs and research of the exhibition I-You-They: A Century of Artist Women (2021). She co-edited the publications accompanying the exhibitions John Craxton: Drawn to Light (2023) and I am Nobody. Are you Nobody too? (2022).
Prior to joining Meşher, she worked at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) as gallery curator between 2013-2019. She worked as the managing curator of ANAMED’s 2017 exhibition The Curious Case of Çatalhöyük that travelled to the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London in 2018. She contributed with entries and articles in various media and scholarly publications including The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archeology, (Oxford University Press: 2022).
Çetin is a fellow of the British Museum’s International Training Programme (2014, department of Greece and Rome with partner placement at Birmingham Museums Trust.) She holds her BA in Economics from Marmara University and MA in Cultural Management from Universitat International de Catalunya, Barcelona.