Gökçen Erkılıç is a trans-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator. Her practice uses mapping and critical cartography as a base to explore urban geography, architecture, and spatial humanities, focusing on political ecology and spatial justice in conflicted borders and margins.

In her works, she challenges traditional roles, forms, and media of mapping. She explores the intimate potential and power of mapping to impact society. Her academic research Coastline Atlas focuses on disentangling human-environment relations in critical geographies of water infrastructures, borders, and cartographic histories. She works with coastlines and displacements along the land and water divide. Her pedagogy focuses on mapping as a method for community engagement, personal storytelling, and a matter of care.

Gökçen is currently teaching at Northeastern University College of Art Media and Design in Art+Design. She was a visiting researcher at Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2021-23). She is a graduate of Middle East Technical University, Department of Architecture in Ankara. She holds a master's degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Architectural and Urban Design (2012) and a PhD from Istanbul Technical University with her thesis “This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul” (2019).