Jan Ralske, born in 1959 in the USA, is a filmmaker and media artist. He studied directing at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, and his graduation film, Not a Love Song, won the 1998 German Film Journalists’ Award for best feature film of the year. In 2000 he was European filmmaker-in-residence at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and, among other things, taught as visiting professor at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. He worked with Harun Farocki for more than 20 years and thus increasingly moved in art contexts. His films, which range from video art to documentaries and feature films, have been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions (including the Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin Biennale, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Modern Art Oxford, Gwangju Biennale, and Barcelona Loop). At Tarabya he developed a theater project based on texts by Nâzim Hikmet. Ralske is currently working on a historical series about the radical left in the United States.
 
Jan Ralske was a resident at Tarabya Cultural Academy from November 2017 to January 2018 and from July to August 2018.