Rahşan Düren (M.D.) was born in 1975 in Flensburg, Germany. In 2002, she graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cologne. She also obtained a double major degree in Art History, Philosophy and Political Science from RWTH Aachen University (2001). She completed her medical specialization in Psychiatry at the Marmara University (2010).

Düren continued to pursue her academic career in neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Hospital and the Berenson Allen Center for Brain Stimulation (2013-2015). She worked at the international humanitarian aid organization Médecins du Monde as a manager for the initiative “Management, development and coordination of the refugee mental health projects in Turkey” by the General Directorate of European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG-ECHO) (2018-2021). As an academic assistant at Koç University’s Faculty of Medicine, she participated in scientific studies on trauma and creativity (2019-2024). Since 2011, she has been working at the VKF American Hospital, Department of Psychiatry.

Living in Istanbul since 2004, Düren professionally practiced her art in Germany during the period 1996-2003 with a particular focus on painting and installation; she participated in several individual and group exhibitions outside of Turkey. Since 2014, the year she realized her largest-scale public art installation E-motions at the Haydarpaşa Train Station, she has defined her fundamental mission as “setting art free, making it open to the public and accessible, both in life and in meaning”. Her belief that art shall be liberated from the confines of the elitist spaces has been influential in her choice of Tarhan Han for her exhibition “Verwegenheit” (2024) and will continue to influence her choice of venues in the future as well.

With her ongoing academic research on science and art, trauma and art, and creativity and existence as well as her pluralist and integrative approach to psychiatry, Düren draws artistic inspiration from medicine, neuroscience, philosophy and humanities as well. The multidisciplinary collaborations she establishes with fields like sound design, film, performance and new media/technology, on the other hand, attest to her determination to overthrow the boundaries between systems of knowledge and the dynamism in her art.