Mayıs Rukel
1992, Ordu, Türkiye
Based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Mayıs Rukel is a Turkish artist, writer, and filmmaker. His work explores magical research, liberatory remembering, radical pedagogies, child-woven futures, and befriending ghosts. He received the GRA Award for Autonomous Arts 2020 and Mondriaan Fonds Kunstenaar Start 2023. His short fiction The Pendant was featured at the Nederlands Film Festival 2020, and his feature-length fiction-documentary Movement Song was part of Mondriaan Fonds Prospects 2025, and was screened at cinemas Studio K and Filmhuis Cavia.

He participated in the research group Tactics of the Plot in 2025, where a diverse group of artists, researchers, and activists examined their practices through Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the plot. In 2022, he participated in the Atelier AM residency, and the resulting multimedia performance ‘To get from one place to another’ was shown at Corrosia Theater in Almere. He holds a BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie and an MFA from the Sandberg Institute’s Ecologies of Transformation, where he explored the role of art and artists in social change.

Rukel is the co-facilitator of Radical Roots, a community-building art project based on stories of food and migration in the refugee centers across the Netherlands. His collaborations include KABK, TENT Rotterdam, and IMPAKT, and his work has been reviewed in De Volkskrant, Het Parool, Metropolis M, (A)WAKE and Filmkrant. His debut novel is set for release in early 2026.