Murat Akser is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Production in the School of Communication and Media, Ulster University. He received his MA degree in Film and his PhD in Communication and Culture from York University, Canada. Dr. Akser has been lecturing in film, media and culture since 1997 at different HE institutions including Bosphorus U., York U., Ryerson U. University of Toronto, KHU and Ulster University. He works extensively on film genre storytelling, independent cinema and film parody, and has recently published a book-length studies on cinema and media, such as New Cinema, New Media: Reinventing Turkish Cinema and Alternative Media in Contemporary Turkey. Murat Akser is also a practicing filmmaker with experience in Toronto and Northern Ireland film industry as a cinematographer, editor, screenwriter and director. His feature screenplay, Rise and Fall, has been accepted to Sundance Screenwriter's Lab in 2014 and his most recent film The Gift won Best International Short FIlm at Dublin Silk Road International Film Festival. For more information on his film work please visit: Murat Akser Film Work. Dr. Akser is a member of International Cinematographers Guild, Academy of Canadian Film and Television and between 2016-2021 an Executive Board Member of European Communication Association.

Murat's research focuses on independent filmmaking practices, particularly new cinemas like Dogme, American independent cinema and New Turkish cinema. He also studies film genre writing and intertextuality.  His most recent work examines film parody, Turkish indie filmmaking practices and alternative media production. Dr. Akser is a member of these scholarly associations:

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) / Network for European Cinema Studies (NECS) / European Communication Research Association (ECREA) / International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) / International Communication Association (ICA)

Recent PhD supervision (Completed):

• John Deery: Alternative Paradigm for Mental Health in Film
• Hamideh Javadi: Feminist Diasporic Video Art in the Middle East
• Kevin Gaffney: Queer Filmmaking: Search for a new homonormativity.

Murat currently supervises the following PhD projects:

• Suphi Keskin: National vs transnational Cinemas
• Lin Zhang: Post-2001 Women Directors in Chinese Cinema
• Cem Koc: Producing Archive and Cultural Memory: Kurdish Documentary Cinema

Murat currently teaches the following modules:

Screenwriting; Editing for Film and Television; The Short Film.

Murat previously taught the following modules:

Web Series; Visual Storytelling; Independent Film, World Cinemas, Introduction to Film Art; Dramatic Short; Feature Screenwriting; Editing; Introduction to Filmmaking; Theories of Media and Communication; Film, Television and Society.