Kutluğ Ataman (born 1961 in Istanbul Turkey) is an acclaimed Turkish-American[1] contemporary artist and feature filmmaker.

His early art works examine the ways in which people and communities create and rewrite their identities through self-expression, blurring the line between reality and fiction.

As a young man, he was involved in filming the events of the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, which led to his imprisonment and torture.

[4] In 1997 Ataman directed an eight-hour video, entitled kutluğ ataman’s semiha b. unplugged, focusing his hand-held camera on one of Turkey's legends, the opera diva Semiha Berksoy, once publicly persecuted for an affair with the exiled communist poet Nazım Hikmet, now found living on in obscurity as an octogenarian in an eccentric dream world of her own creation.

[5] Ataman's next production, the feature film Lola+Bilidikid, made in 1998, was set in the trans subculture within the Turkish guest-worker community of Berlin, Germany.

His art works have been shown at Documenta (2002), the Venice Biennale (1999) as well as the Biennials in São Paulo (2002, 2010), Berlin (2001) and Istanbul (1997, 2003, 2007 and 2011).

Mesopotamian Dramaturgies – a multi-element work was exhibited in Linz as part of European Capital of Culture 2009, and subsequently at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne before its showing at MAXXI in Rome in 2010 and ARTER in Istanbul in 2011.

In 2012 Ataman released Sılsel, a “timeline” made out of artworks contributed by viewers for the Istanbul International Theatre Festival.

In 2013 Ataman made a public announcement that he needed a clean break from his film and art practice in order to be able to concentrate on “the next chapter”.

Since then, he delivered only The Portrait of Sakıp Sabancı in 2014, a large video sculpture made out of nearly ten thousand LED screens.

[28] In 2015, Kutluğ Ataman initiated Palanga Art and Architecture Farm (PAAF) at a ranch he established in the mountains of Erzincan, Turkey.

While declaring the ranch as “a living land art”, he is pioneering environmentally respectful and responsible holistic farming methods in Turkey.