Emine Gozde Sevim

Emine Gozde Sevim (b. 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey) arrived in the United States in 2001 as a scholarship student in high school. She graduated from Bard College in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Photography, Sociology and International Relations.

During her college years, Sevim studied old and new photographic methods and theory with Gilles Peress, Stephen Shore, An-My Líª, John Pilson and Barbara Ess. As a result of her developing interest in the convergence between film/video and photography, she began experimenting with multimedia storytelling. Her first photo-roman piece was exhibited as part of a group exhibition "Stage Sight” in the Opera House of Hudson, in upstate New York in 2007. For her undergraduate thesis exhibition, she created a multimedia film entitled "In Search of Audra Prokofiev”, along side of a photographic print exhibition with the same title in 2008 at Bard College’s Woods Gallery.

Following graduation, Sevim was invited to work with various photographers of the Magnum Photos Agency in New York. Between 2008 and 2012, she assisted Gilles Peress on numerous projects in field research, book productions, and exhibitions, and Susan Meiselas on the establishment of the Magnum Foundation NY and on multimedia storytelling assignments for international venues. In 2010, Sevim joined Marco Bischof, filmmaker and director of the Werner Bischof Estate in Switzerland, in the development of the MagnumTime project of the Magnum Foundation, a non-linear interactive oral history project about photographic traditions where she worked as cinematographer and associate producer.

Alongside independent projects with pioneers in the field, since 2007, Sevim embarked on creating an "alternative” Middle-Eastern visual narrative in the context of post-9/11 era. Her maternal family had left Kabul, Afghanistan in 1975, where Sevim returned to visit with her Afghan grandfather in 2007, following the U.S. invasion. Since then, she has worked in Israel and the West Bank, in Egypt and in Turkey as continuation of a comprehensive project about "lives-in-passing” in contested geographies. In an attempt to expand beyond the religio-political descriptions of life in the region, Sevim’s visual narrative deals with existentialist complexities of provincial daily realities in the context of current historical transitions.

Her on-going body of work about the Middle East has been included in various exhibitions and publications internationally and has won numerous international awards and recognitions. Sevim’s first monograph, "Embed in Egypt” was a finalist for the coveted MACK’s First Book Award in London (2014), as a result added to the National Media Museum Collection in Bradford, U.K. and was published by the German publisher Kehrer Verlag in 2015.The same year, Sevim was also named as one of the 11 photographers to receive support from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund for her most recent work "Homeland Delirium”. In 2016, she was also selected as one of PDN’s 30 Photographers to Watch.

Sevim is based in New York and is represented by Doha/Dubai based East Wing Gallery.