Tanju Özdemir
Tanju Özdemir is a Turkish filmmaker from the Black Sea region whose narrative films explore the complexities of immigration, identity, and memory across borders and generations. His work has been featured at prominent national and international film festivals. He received his MFA in film and media arts from Emerson College and currently teaches film production as an assistant professor at Emory University. Prior to filmmaking, he studied physics at Boğaziçi University, where his interest in cosmology and data science began. Özdemir recently completed production on his short film WOODPECKER which follows a Kurdish gay graduate student from Turkey seeking asylum in the US while navigating the complexities of the Turkish-Kurdish diaspora. He is currently developing his debut feature film, THE RINGS OF SATURN.