Dr. Öğr. Üyesi EKİN PİNAR

Ekin Pınar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. Trained in histories of art, architecture, and cinema, she received her Ph.D. from the History of Art department at the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation, “Canyon Collective Artists: Micropolitics in West Coast Experimental Film, 1960–79,” examined experimental film as a spatial, institutional, and historiographic practice.

Her research situates moving-image practices within broader architectural, urban, and museological frameworks, with a particular focus on exhibition spaces, site-specificity, and the spatial politics of modern and contemporary cultural production. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods from architectural history, film and media studies, and contemporary art history, her work investigates how cinematic and artistic practices produce, critique, and reimagine built environments and institutional spaces. Her publications have appeared in Camera Obscura, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, ARCHNET-IJAR, Journal of Design Studio, and Open Screens, as well as two edited volumes, Mobility and Fantasy (Routledge, 2014) and Cinematic Starchitecture (Routledge, 2025) among others. Her current research focuses on architectural histories of expanded cinema and the spatial practices of moving-image exhibitions.

Ekin’s curatorial experience has been integral to her research practice. She served as a Zigrosser Fellow and film intern at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she co-curated, with Anna Vallye, an experimental film screening series in conjunction with the exhibition Léger: Modern Art in the Metropolis (2013). In 2021–22, as a Canyon Cinema Discovered Curatorial Fellow, she curated the exhibition Insurgent Articulations, which explored the spatial and political dimensions of experimental cinema.

She has taught courses on architectural history and theory; interdisciplinarity, cinematic space; gender, sexuality, and cinema; animation theory; and histories of modern and contemporary art at Middle East Technical University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Franklin & Marshall College. In recognition of her teaching, she received Mustafa Parlar Foundation's Instructor of the Year Award in 2022. Aiming to bridge the gap between research and pedagogy in higher education, she has also published scholarly work on interdisciplinary teaching practices in architecture and design education.