Nilsu (she/her) is an architect and design researcher currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture by Design at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), the University of Edinburgh.

Her work explores architecture through the critical and creative practice of dismantling, rethinking, and deciphering rather than merely establishing structures. In her doctoral research, she deals with the things that she can’t change (an extraphilosophical position she has developed) through situated feminist research methods. These concerns are often related to the planetary-scale debris of the interconnected crises we face on Earth. For instance, landscapes that have been overdrawn, despoiled, toxified, extracted, or otherwise exhausted. Working through by-design relays, her project asks how to become-with such landscapes, engaging with their material and immaterial stories without relying on distanced observation or representational fixity.

Experimenting across film, cartography, drawing, model-making, photographic and artefactual practices, exhausted landscapes are approached not as distant objects but as bioecological fields in constant inter- and intra-action with human and more-than-human forces. Her research is deliberately risky: by offering worldings, it brings to the surface the tensions between staying with and dealing with trouble.

Nilsu holds a Master’s in Architectural Design from Istanbul Technical University and a Bachelor's degree in Architecture with the valedictorian of the department prize from Yıldız Technical University. She obtained support from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) for her MA studies.

She has shown her work internationally in exhibitions, masterclasses, symposia and journals. In 2025, she co-authored a research-by-design study titled ‘Soil as Resource, Not Waste: A Trans-material Approach to Architectural Production,’ which was showcased at the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale following its presentation at the Production Studies International Conference at Newcastle University in 2024. Her architectural essay film, ‘The Collage of Dealing with Things that I Can’t Change,’ was screened at the Architecture Fringe Festival 2025 in Scotland and Good Design Izmir 2024. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Architectural Education. In 2025, she received the Barrie Wilson PhD Award from the ESALA PGR Committee, which is awarded annually to a first-year PhD student in recognition of excellence in the First Year Report and contributions to the student body.