Ayşe Polat is a film director, screenwriter, and producer. After numerous award-winning short films, she made her first feature film, Auslandstournee (Foreign Tour), in 1999. The film was shown in the competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival and at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The film En Garde followed in 2003 and received the Silver Leopard in the categories Best Film” and “Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2004, and the German Critics’ Prize for the best feature film in 2005. In 2009 she made the comedy Luks Glück (Luk’s Luck), in 2013 Die Erbin (The Heiress), and in 2016, as part of the Tarabya residency, the documentary Die Anderen (2016/17) (The Others), which garnered several awards, including the Ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness. Most recently she directed the Tatort Dortmund (Crime Scene Dortmund) episode Masken (Masks) (2020), and is currently working on a new feature film, Im toten Winkel (Blind Spot), for which she wrote the script and is both director and co-producer. In 2017-18 she was artist-in-residence at the Free University of Berlin/Film Studies as part of the program “Cinepoetics – Poetologies of Audiovisual Images.”
 
Ayşe Polat was a resident at Tarabya Culture Academy from December 2013 to February 2014, from August to November 2014 and from July to August 2015.