Umit Gulsen, Director of Photography

Umit grew up on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, around the fishing port of Dereköy in Samsun.

His film journey began in 2001 at Marmara University’s Faculty of Communications in Istanbul, where he studied mostly theory: close readings of classic films and directors, and essays on the challenges and potential of cinema as an art. Alongside his studies he worked as an assistant director on TV series, short films and documentaries, among them the short Blue, supervised by Majid Majidi, the first Iranian director to be nominated for an Oscar.

That path is what sets him apart. Umit spent his early years on the theory and directing side of film before switching to cinematography, so he doesn’t only know how to light and frame a shot: he speaks the director’s language. He understands why a scene needs to feel a certain way, and turns that into choices of lens, light and movement.

He moved to Washington, DC in 2009 as a multimedia producer, and the city has been his base ever since. In 2015 he went freelance as a cinematographer, and in 2016 he earned his MA in Film and Video from American University.

He has since shot hundreds of projects. For four seasons he was the cinematographer on WETA PBS’s If You Lived Here. He has filmed more than 60 interviews and features for The Wall Street Journal, from cabinet secretaries to the Peabody-nominated documentary Shadow Men: Inside Wagner, and his credits include work for Netflix, HBO, the BBC and Quanta Magazine, whose science films took him inside NASA Goddard. His U.S. cinematography on Yalla Parkour screened at the 2025 Berlinale.

Much of his work happens in rooms most crews never see: the White House, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Capitol and federal agencies, where security screening, tight load-ins and a hard out are part of the job. Further afield, he has filmed Project Concern International’s USDA-funded Food for Education programs in Guatemala and Tanzania, and shot US stories for producers and broadcasters from Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and Singapore.

“I never dreamed, when I was just starting out in Istanbul, that I would actually be shooting film after film in so many exciting places around the globe.”

On every project Umit connects with the environment and its rhythm, and draws on his experience to shape a visual language that fits the soul of the film. In his words: “I am after beauty that presents itself in a myriad of forms in our world — beauty that has a value beyond the film screen.”