Sinem Banna Biography

BIOGRAPHY
		Born in 1968 Istanbul, currently lives in San Francisco. Sinem Banna received a B.F.A in ceramics and glass from Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul in 1989. After graduating she first went to Villa Arson Academy in Nice and then to Paris to continue studying art. Her journey took her to the United States where she has received an M.F.A in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. During these years, she began to introduce words and objects such as toy parts, tea glasses and coffee beans as cultural signs into her work. She has created many poetic sculptural compositions, a number of them on plexiglas constructions and light boxes. Throughout Europe and the U.S., her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including San Francisco, New York, New Mexico, Los Angeles and Istanbul. She also presented her work in Copenhagen and Elsinore, Denmark where she was honored a first prize award in the “Brain and Self” exhibit in 1996. Recently she was selected by the international jury of Artiade as a cultural ambassador of art for USA/Turkey in the ARTIADE/Olympics of Visual Arts during the Olympic games in Athens 2004. Banna has also won numerous prizes in Europe and the United States for her works of art. Through her three dimensional conceptual compositions Banna always examines life, cultural identities and social conflicts in a very poetic way by combining everyday objects with words and light. She is widely recognized by media including New York Times, CNN Turkey and San Francisco Examiner. Sinem Banna who taught sculpture at California State University, Sacramento is recently a part-time faculty at the University of Phoenix.
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