Nurbanu Asena
Nurbanu is a practicing multidisciplinary artist/lecturer with works in illustration, animation and XR mediums, and Course Director for ARU's MA Illustration. She likes to create projects around the topics of psychology, society, motherhood, children and empowerment. Her animated documentaries have been shown across 30+ festivals worldwide and won national awards in Turkey. Some of her previous clients include Adobe, Apple, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford, to name a few.
She/her
- Faculty:
- Faculty of Arts, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
- School:
- Cambridge School of Art
- Location:
- Cambridge
- Areas of Expertise:
- Illustration, drawing and book art , Media arts
- Background
Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Nurbanu receive her BFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design (’09) in New York and MA at Goldsmiths, University of London (’17) as a Chevening Scholar.
Through her creative practice, as Nunulanka Studio, she has undertaken projects for organisations including Adobe and Apple, as well as the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the Science Museum and The Guardian. She was also selected for Adobe's Augmented Reality Artist Residency, where she began developing her practice in location-based AR.
In 2024, she created the Cambridge ReseARch Trail, an augmented reality project developed for Cambridge Festival that transforms research across the University of Cambridge into interactive visual experiences. The project was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards. Nurbanu is also the director and producer of two short animated documentaries, Invisible Walls: Tales of Insecurity (2016) and Meeting (2020). Her films explore personal stories and emotional experiences through animation and documentary storytelling, and have been screened internationally, including through the prestigious Hisar Short Film Selection. She is also the animation artist behind the feature-length documentary Pablo, The Movie (2012), about legendary film title designer Pablo Ferro.
Alongside her moving-image practice, Nurbanu has developed a drawing-based practice exploring embodiment, memory, relationships and lived experience. Her first solo exhibition, Matresens (2024), was presented at Istanbul Design Museum and supported by Wysing Arts Centre. The exhibition brought together oil pastel drawings, coloured pencil, embroidery and animation to explore the physical, emotional and spatial transformations associated with motherhood.
Selected exhibitions, talks and projects
- Matresens, Solo Exhibition, Istanbul Design Museum, 2024
- From the Field, Istanbul Design Museum, 2024 – British Council Creative Collaborations
- Cambridge ReseARch Trail, Cambridge Festival, 2024 – Augmented Reality
- Creative Cambridge, Panelist, 2023
- Ozmoz, Istanbul, 2020
- I am Number Seventeen, London, 2020
- Adobe Augmented Reality Artist Residency, 2020
- Spoken Languages
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- Turkish
- English
- Research interests
-
- Documentary approaches to personal stories and emotional experience
- Motherhood and comics
- Collaborative image-making and storytelling with children
- Illustration and animation within XR and immersive environments
- Teaching
-
Nurbanu currently teaches on the following modules:
- Master's Project: Illustration
- Qualifications
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- MA Documentary Filmmaking, Goldsmith’s University of London
- BFA Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design, NY