Didem Coskunseven studied history and violin in Ankara, and then continued her studies in music, visual arts, and philosophy at Yıldız Technical University followed by the Center for Advanced Studies in Music at Istanbul Technical University. In 2018, she began a doctoral dissertation in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, which she completed in 2022. In the meantime, she participated in the Cursus in Composition and Computer Music at IRCAM in 2021, where she created, as an end-of-training piece, Day Was Departing, for tenor, choreography filmed by students of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and electronics.

Coskunseven has been a freelance composer and musician since 2010. She plays keyboard and synthesizer in the independent jazz duo BLOV. She also is an artistic director for interdisciplinary projects with ensembles, choreographers, and video artists. Her projects include work for the IRCAM ManiFeste Festival, Ensemble Nikel, the Donaueschinger Festival, the Ensemble L’Itinéraire, the Groupe de recherches musicales de l’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, the Centre Pompidou, the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and France Musique.

Her catalog includes instrumental pieces, some of which incorporate electronics, and arrangements of songs that reflect her interest in experimental electronic music and modal jazz (she studied with one of the pioneers of jazz composition in Turkey, Emin Fındıkoğlu). One of the key elements of her work lies in questions of musical appreciation and taste, a reflection linked with the notion of duende as theorized by the poet Federico García Lorca. Her attention is thus concentrated on the ineffable character of the spectator’s feeling in front of a live performance and on the collective experience of the concert.