Hale Ekinci
Meet our Spring 2023 Artist in Residence
The Cook Center's Engaged Artist-in-Residence program brings two working artists to the Bloomington campus each year to work and interact with IU students and community members through a series of workshops, outreach projects, and exhibitions.
The residencies are designed to advance a model of “engaged” artistic practice that supports artists whose careers can be significantly furthered by access to IU’s resources in curation, collections, and research, and who can, in turn, activate those resources in new ways and demonstrate new engaged modes of artistic exchange for the campus’s largely rural, Midwestern community.
Hale Ekinci (b. 1984 in Karamursel, Turkey) is a multidisciplinary Turkish artist, designer, and educator based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Design at North Central College. Exploring personal history, cultural identity, gender politics, and craft traditions, her works vary from videos to embroidery paintings embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and autobiographical relics. She was recently a Facebook Chicago Artist in Resident. Her work has been exhibited nationally at EXPO Chicago, Studio Gang, Co-Prosperity, One After 909, Woman Made Gallery, South Bend Museum of Art, Koehnline Museum of Art, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, and Queens College Art Center. Her videos have been screened internationally, including New York City, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. She completed residencies at ACRE, Jiwar Barcelona, Momentum Worldwide Berlin, Elsewhere Museum, and Chicago Artist Coalition.
More about Hale