Yeşim Özsoy is a writer, director and performer and founder of GalataPerform, an independent theatre and performance space in Istanbul. She is also the artistic director of the New Text Project which began in 2006 to develop playwriting in Turkey. Yeşim has a BA in Sociology from Boğaziçi University. During her BA, she joined the Studio Players Acting School, and later attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She has an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Yeşim performed in New York and Chicago, and upon her return to Istanbul, founded the GalataPerform Theatre Company, with which she has created and produced numerous plays. Her plays have been translated into English, French, German, Catalan, Russian and Italian. She was nominated and received awards for her work as both playwright and director, and has attended both national and international festivals. GalataPerform also initiated projects and festivals, including the Visibility project (2004-2012), which was about the relation between GalataPerform and its surrounding neighborhood, and the New Text Project (2006-…), which initiated the development of new writing in Turkey. In 2010, she was invited to Wiesbaden Staatstheater to write and direct the play Türkiye-Almanya 0-0.

Her recent work include Istanbul Testimonials, which was a collaborative piece on the Gezi events written by four New Text Project playwrights; Love and Fascism, which was staged at the Istanbul International Theatre Festival and combined her own work with that of other playwrights from Romania, Scotland, and Spain; the play İz, for which she was nominated for a Best Director award and toured in Germany; Old Child, a play on the real life stories of four children killed in the Middle East; Limping Tales from Istanbul, which premiered at Barcelona’s GREC Festival and was performed in Catalan; and House of Hundred, which was part of a multi-national co-production titled Haunted Houses, involving participants from Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Switzerland and Germany. The play premiered in 2018, at both the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin and the Istanbul International Theatre Festival.