Paulina Akbay (born 1997, Istanbul) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and aspiring researcher and curator who lives in Cologne. They hold an interdisciplinary media degree (BA) from the University of Cologne and is currently working on their diploma at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts (KHM). They also completed an exchange semester in the subject ‘Cross-Disciplinary Strategies’ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Akbay works in the fields of photography, film, curatorial practice and visual research, and since 2025 has been investigating how memory, community, time, place and imagination interact with visual culture and social processes. They explore how these relationships manifest themselves in spaces, bodies and images, and how individual experiences are interwoven with political, cultural and ecological structures.

In addition, they are developing a research-based curatorial approach to visual culture, archives and collective knowledge production, with a particular interest in socially engaged artistic practices that explore how the arts can contribute to new ways of thinking and imagining.