Derya Aydın was born and raised in Turkey. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and a minor in Philosophy from Yeditepe University before pursuing a graduate degree in Cultural Studies, which she completed at Sabancı University in 2017 in Istanbul. Her master's thesis, titled “Cemeteries and Memorials: Violence, Death and Mourning in Kurdish Society,” explores death and commemoration practices in the context of political violence in Kurdistan. Her interdisciplinary research interests primarily engage with the meaning of political death and the political subjectivity among Kurdish people. Her research brings together the critical studies of sovereignty, state violence, the anthropology of violence, colonialism, necropolitics, and anthropology of mourning, the gendered division of labor of mourning, emotions, and memory. Her work responds to the recent calls in anthropology to embrace decolonial, abolitionist, and non-positivist methodologies. Aydın has made significant contributions to various research projects, as well as to socialist and feminist policymaking initiatives, impacting the Middle East region. With a decade of experience as a political advisor in the Turkish parliament, she has closely followed the law-making process and prepared numerous rights-based reports. This role has allowed her to observe the limitations of formal law and parliamentary politics, leading her to consider the role of state necropolitics in Kurdistan. In 2018, Derya worked with Zochrot, a Tel Aviv-based organization focused on collective memory and historical narrative. Additionally, she served on the board of management for the Zan Foundation for Social, Political, and Economic Studies in Northern Kurdistan. In December 2020, Derya became a co-spokesperson for the Respect and Justice for the Dead Initiative, an independent human rights advocacy platform in Turkey. In this role, she was one of the organizers of a conference entitled “Respect and Justice for the Dead” in Istanbul. Additionally, she developed national and international networks with scholars focused on intense conflicts in regions such as Palestine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Iraq, Spain, and Argentina. As a member of the editorial board of the Jineoloji Journal, she actively engaged with the contemporary debates in feminist theory and, more importantly, the gendered division of labor of mourning and the gendered role of the dead body.