Mayıs Rukel is a Turkish artist, published writer, and filmmaker whose practice explores decolonial archiving, magical research, liberatory remembering, queer memory, radical pedagogies, and befriending ghosts. His practice received the GRA Award for Autonomous Arts (2020), Mondriaan Fonds Kunstenaar Start (2023), Het Cultuurfonds (2026) and more.
His short fiction The Pendant was featured at the Nederlands Film Festival (2020), while his feature-length fiction-documentary Movement Song premiered at IFFR 2026. His debut novel, Güneşhamağı, was published by Ithaki in April 2026.
Rukel holds a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and an MFA from the Sandberg Institute’s Ecologies of Transformation, where he investigated the role of art in social change.
He co-facilitates Radical Roots, a community-building art project exploring food and migration in refugee centers across the Netherlands. His collaborations include KABK, TENT Rotterdam, IMPAKT, Taragaon Next, and Sattya Collective. His work has been reviewed by De Volkskrant, Het Parool, Metropolis M, Filmkrant, and others.