Dilek Cantekin Elyağutu

He was born in Malatya in 1985. He completed his elementary, middle, and high school education in Istanbul. In 2005, he was admitted to the Turkish Folk Dances Department at the Sakarya University State Conservatory and graduated in 2009. In 2011, he completed his master’s degree in the Department of Folklore and Musicology at the Institute of Social Sciences, Sakarya University. That same year, he began studying the Laban Movement Notation system with Janos Fügedi, a senior researcher at the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2012, she completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Physical Education and Sports Teaching at Gazi University with a thesis titled “A Comparison of the Laban Movement Notation System and Traditional Methods in Folk Dance Instruction in Terms of Learning Outcomes.” Between 2018 and 2019, she conducted her postdoctoral research at the Folk Dances Department of the Institute of Musicology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Janos Fügedi, focusing on “The Examination of Written Research on Turkish Folk Dances and the Creation of a Movement Notation Archive Based on Analysis Outcomes.” In 2023, she was awarded the title of Associate Professor in the field of Performing Arts, Dance, and Choreography.

Cantekin Elyağutu, who has been serving at the Sakarya University State Conservatory since 2010, has participated in numerous artistic events organized by the institution as a costume designer, dance instructor, and choreographer.

He currently serves as the principal investigator of the TÜBİTAK 1001 project titled “Identification, Transcription, and Analysis of Turkish Folk Dances During the First 50 Years of the Republic of Turkey (1923–1973).”