Gülgün Kayim will never forget the first time she saw a play. It changed her life. She was 15 and a high school student in North London, where her family had lived ever since they were forced to leave Cyprus in 1968 because of violence between the island’s Greek and Turkish communities. Kayim (M.F.A. ’93) was only 5 when her family fled their home, and her childhood in England had been marked by the economic and emotional stresses that often follow such an abrupt displacement.  

“My parents were Muslim and were uneducated refugees,” she says, her British accent still intact after over three decades in Minnesota. “They weren’t thinking about theater or music or anything like that. [The arts] weren’t a part of my upbringing at all.” 

The play—Kayim remembers it was a musical—was in a magnificent old theater in London’s West End. She was seated high in the balcony, but even from so far away, she was transfixed by the performance. “I was gobsmacked,” she says. Soon after, she started participating in plays, mostly behind the scenes so she wouldn’t embarrass her mother, who didn’t think it was proper for a Muslim girl to appear onstage.  

“The reason theater and art in general was really important to me was that it was healing,” says Kayim. “It offered me an opportunity to deal with the stress of who I was and how I was brought up.” Today, that insight is hardwired into Kayim’s work as the founding director of arts, culture, and the creative economy for the city of Minneapolis, where she develops programs to support artistic entrepreneurs, creative businesses, and arts and cultural nonprofits. “Creativity is really critical to [a community’s] mental health,” she says, pointing to the artistic outpouring that took place in Minneapolis at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue after George Floyd was murdered. “It creates a sense of connectedness, a sense of belonging, a sense of well-being. … It’s an outlet and a way for people to connect and process what’s going on in their lives.”

Kayim completed her undergraduate studies at Middlesex University London in 1987, majoring in the-ater with an emphasis on directing. Unfortunately, she couldn’t secure financial support for graduate studies in the United Kingdom. However, at an arts summer camp in New Jersey, she fell in love with a fellow intern named David Yanko, an American. He told her about teaching assistantships at American universities, which provide tuition and an income in exchange for teaching. After Kayim investigated a number of opportunities, the University of Minnesota offered a financial package that allowed her to complete an M.F.A. in theater arts and still be relatively close to Yanko, who was getting a master’s degree in arts administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She moved to Minnesota in 1989. She and Yanko have been married since 1993 and have three adult children.

While at the U of M, Kayim interned at the Guthrie Theater, completing a directing internship with then-artistic director Garland Wright. She also worked at the Weisman Museum as its first public art coordinator, a job she continued after she graduated. The idea of visual art being commissioned for specific settings appealed to her. What would happen, she wondered, if she applied that concept to the performing arts? Could she create plays that weren’t performed in theaters but instead were intimately tied to their unique settings? 

Kayim answered those questions together with fellow students Sean Kelley-Pegg (M.F.A. ’95) and Charles Campbell (M.A. ’93, Ph.D. ’97). In 1996, they founded Skewed Visions, a multidisciplinary collective that created site-specific performances, including The Car, a trilogy where the audience was driven around Minneapolis in the back seats of cars while the actors, including Campbell, drove and acted from the front seat. Both Kayim and Kelley-Pegg directed. The play premiered at the 2000 MN Fringe Festival and was as much theater as placemaking, where the city’s skyline and storefronts interacted with the human stories unfolding before the audience. Another piece created by Kayim took place over 24 hours in a room at Southwest High School in Minneapolis and depicted “rubber rooms,” which are reassignment centers that New York City schools used to house teachers who were accused of misconduct. 

Despite Skewed Visions’ influence—the company was named “Artists of the Year” by the alternative weekly paper City Pages in 2004—and Kayim’s prestigious lineup of grants, awards, and fellowships, (including a Creative Capital Foundation Grant and a Bush Foundation Art-ist Fellowship) she found that she wasn’t able to make enough to raise a family from her work alone. 
That dilemma motivated her to apply for a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant to investigate how to make a living in the arts. (The program ran from 1986 to 2018 and allowed artists to explore their cultural and artistic roots, work with mentors, and attend training programs to develop new skills.) In 2006, Kayim trav-eled home to London to do research. “I walked away firmly believing that government is really important in supporting this kind of [artistic] work,” she says. 

Which led to her current job for Minneapolis, which she started in 2011. Her initial title was director of arts. After she was hired and learned more about the role, she pitched to expand that title to include arts, culture, and the creative economy to better reflect the full scope of the work. Today, she assists other artists in building their careers with the government’s help. 

Starting in 2013, Kayim’s team has produced the Min-neapolis Creative Index: a biannual report that examines the impact of the city’s arts and cultural offerings. It looks  at demographic trends and compares Minneapolis to other regions across the country. 

Originally published by Minnesota Alumni. Photo credit: Susannah Ireland