Nilgün Bayraktar is a film and media studies scholar whose research and teaching focus on cinema, visual culture, migration, borders, mobility, and moving-image art. She is an associate professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts, where she teaches in film, visual studies, contemporary art, and graduate fine arts.
Bayraktar’s scholarship examines how cinema and moving-image practices engage questions of displacement, transnational mobility, memory, and border regimes. Her work brings together film theory, visual culture, critical border studies, global cinema, and contemporary art, with particular attention to migrant and diasporic cinemas, the essay film, speculative visual cultures, and the politics of space and movement.
She is the author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge, 2016; paperback 2018), which analyzes how contemporary films and moving-image artworks reimagine migration, mobility, borders, and belonging beyond Eurocentric frameworks. Her current book project, Border Futurities: Countermemory and Speculative Imagination, extends this work by examining how contemporary cinema and visual art mobilize speculative aesthetics, countermemory, and decolonial imagination to contest border violence and envision alternative futures.
Bayraktar received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching includes courses on film aesthetics and theory, film history, migration and mobility, dystopian and speculative cinema, cinematic cities, visual culture, and contemporary moving-image art.
Select Publications
- Materiality of Resistance: American Art, Visual Culture and Activism. Co-edited with Elizabeth Mangini (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2026). Funded by Terra Foundation.
- E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture. Co-edited with Alberto Godioli (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
- Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe. London, New York: Routledge, 2016. Paperback edition, 2018.
- “Waking the Statue: Material Agency and Critical Fabulation in Mati Diop’s Speculative Essay Film Dahomey (2024),” in The Handbook of Personal CinemaEds. Laura Rascaroli and Laura Busetta (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
- “The Transmedial Borderscape: Refugee Chronotopes and the Decentered Grammar of World Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema. Eds. Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann. 2nd edition (Routledge, forthcoming 2026).
- “Refugee Futurity” Encyclopedia Entry, in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies. Ed. Yến Lê Espiritu. (Sage Publishing, 2024).
- “Perpetual Crisis: Post-apocalyptic Refugee Timescapes in Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2014–2017),” in Negotiations of Migration in Artistic and Critical Practices: Reexamining the Past and Present in Contemporary Europe. Eds. Annimari Juvonen and Verena Lindemann Lino (De Gruyter, 2021).
- “Location and Mobility in Kutluğ Ataman’s Site-specific Video Installation Küba,” in Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens. Eds by Sabine Hake & Barbara Mennel, (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. Paperback edition, 2014).
- “Beyond the Spectacle of ‘Refugee Crisis’: Multidirectional Memories of Migration in Contemporary Essay Film,” Journal of European Studies 49, special issue on “European Crises,” eds. V. Alexander, A. Godioli, F. Lippert, L. Rensmann, P. Valdivia (November 2019): 1-20.
- “Heterotopic Intersections of Tourism and Undocumented Migration in Southern Europe: The Video Essay Sudeuropa,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 103 (2013): 17-43.
