Elif Kir Cullen

Biography

Elif is an educator, researcher, and creative drama facilitator whose work bridges linguistics, teacher education, and the arts. Elif’s love for teaching began to take shape at a teacher training high school in İstanbul, Türkiye, and continued with an honours B.A. degree from the Faculty of Education, followed by an M.A. in Language Teaching and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. She has held academic positions as a research assistant and assistant professor at Faculties of Education in Türkiye, where she trained prospective teachers and delivered courses in education and linguistics. She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S.A. and worked as a researcher at Humboldt University in Germany. Her passion for creative drama was formalised through training with the Contemporary Drama Association in İstanbul and further developed during a postdoctoral research fellowship in Drama in Education at Trinity College Dublin. Elif has designed and facilitated drama workshops for diverse groups and delivered B.A. and M.A. level courses on integrating drama into educational contexts. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language, identity, and arts-based practice. Her teaching and facilitation philosophy is rooted in creating participatory, humanistic environments enriched with the arts, where her 10C principles—care, creativity, curiosity, communication, collaboration, cooperation, constructivism, collective experience, community building, and critical reflection—form the heart of her practice.