Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoctoral researcher and graduate program coordinator at the Schaufler Lab at Technische Universität Dresden. Her current research explores how data-driven media intersect with urban, migrant, and environmental movements, emphasizing artistic practices and infrastructures that challenge extractive visions of the future and cultivate alternative modes of world- and future-making.

İşcen earned her PhD in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. Her dissertation, The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East, examines how artistic practices in the Middle East and its diaspora contest imperial and racialized logics of computational media, producing counter-visual aesthetics and alternative socio-technical imaginaries. 

She has contributed to the multimodal project Against Catastrophe, led by Prof. Orit Halpern, as part of Governing Through Design, a collaborative initiative funded by the SNSF Sinergia Grant. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

İşcen has published extensively in edited volumes, art catalogues, and academic journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Media Theory, and Organised Sound. She co-edited the volume Displacing Theory Through the Global South with Iracema Dulley, published by ICI Berlin Press in 2024. 

She has taught courses on digital media and arts at Universität der Künste Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she collaborates with Shintaro Miyazaki on alternative futures of computing through the web-based platform Counter-N.