Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1990. She studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins in London and the Universität der Künste Berlin, and lives and works in Berlin.

Sahin works fluidly across film, photography, sculpture, and literature, moving between words and images, still and moving image, without privileging any one medium — embodying the synchronicity of image- and text-based communication today. Her elliptical, fragmentary narratives draw on the episodic structure of TV series and internet video, knowingly using the codedness of storytelling to sweep viewers toward unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable realizations — among them, that history has always been written through shifting perspectives.

Writing runs in parallel to her exhibitions: she has published three novels, Taxi (2019), Alle Hunde Sterben (2020), and Kommando Ajax. Taxi won the Alfred Döblin-Medaille; Kommando Ajax was selected for the Vienna Literature Prize and shortlisted for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair.

She received the ars viva 2020 Prize for Visual Arts and was a fellow of the Junge Akademie at the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2019), and received the Artist in Residence stipend from the German Foreign Ministry and LVBG (2021).

Her work is held in collections including Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Kunsthaus Zürich; Julia Stoschek Collection; Castello di Rivoli; and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany. Sahin is represented by Esther Schipper Gallery.