Hazal Selçuk

Music and singing are passions that have grown in me since I was a child. But my love of music and heritage stretches back for generations. I come from a family of musicians, singers and performers.  

My father is modern Turkish music composer, singer, pianist and conductor Timur Selçuk. My grandfather is referred to as the classical Turkish music legend, Münir Nurettin Selçuk. My grandmother was an actress, and my mother and sister are choreographers and dancers.

I started as a singer, even representing Turkey at the 1989 Eurovision Song Contest. I performed with my father at numerous concerts.

I experienced the power of my own artistic expression through theater and movement when I started acting and developing original works for theater along with theatrical concerts. I performed in North America, Turkey and Europe.

I never thought of composing or arranging. After my father’s death in November 2020 I felt an irresistible urge to return to music, and started arranging and composing my own songs for the very first time.

Born in Paris, I completed high school at the Austrian high school and attended The Center for Contemporary Music (Çağdaş Müzik Merkezi) in Istanbul where I studied singing, music theory and piano with my father. I then studied musical theater at the State Conservatory of Vienna and later the Boston Conservatory, where I received my BFA majoring in musical theater, minoring in movement and dance.

I received an MFA from York University, graduating from the theater department having specialized in performing movement theater and teaching movement for actors. I was a singer and solo performer for many years and taught the relationship between art-making and healing at art centers and universities.

My interest in the healing dimension of the arts grew as I continued making theater pieces. I experienced the transformative power of the creative process.

This further led me to study movement-based expressive arts therapy and later counseling psychology. I hold an MA from the California Institute of Integral Studies.  

My continued dedication to combine the arts with healing led to advanced work and my specialized certifications in expressive arts therapy, somatic movement therapy and drama therapy.

I have experienced periods of my life where I felt a tension between being a stage performer and my wish to use the arts for therapy and healing. I recognized my path could not be realized without including an emphasis on emotional healing on a professional level. That led me to become a therapist.

Ironically, it was becoming a therapist that brought me back to music, to making my own songs to process grief particularly after my father’s death. My first completed album is YAS, which means grief in Turkish, comprised of ten songs that express various stages and aspects of my grieving process around the losses I experienced in the last few years.

In the course of releasing these songs, I also made videos, discovering and using images that further helped me get in touch with and process deeper parts of my grief experience.

I invite you to listen to those and watch the videos that explore grief. All of them have English subtitles. Use this link to go to YouTube.

I also invite you to visit my professional therapy web site. Here is a link to a page where I explore treatment through creative arts therapies to relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression. You can also find this links to my book A Light In The Tunnel — Finding Your Way Through Depression and Anxiety.