Seyben is an award winning playwright with 20+ years of experience working as a theatre scholar and artist in Türkiye, Europe, and the US. She previously served as the associate professor of theater at the College of Southern Idaho and the assistant professor of theater at Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul University, and Bennington College. She holds a BA in Playwriting (Bennington College), an MA in Visual Communication Design (Istanbul Bilgi University), and a PhD in Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy (Istanbul University). Seyben has been training with National Michael Chekhov Association to be a certified NMCA teacher and director. 

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She published two monographs, Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat (Lexington Books, 2020), and Theater and Multimedia (Habitus Kitap, 2016). Presenting an anti-colonial reading of Turkish theater, Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey is one of the few books on Turkish theater in English and has been reviewed in Theater Survey. She co-edited two conference proceedings books on theatre education. She published papers on Turkish theater in the acclaimed, TDR, Third Text, and The International Journal of Cultural Policy.

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Seyben is a creative writer who won Spokane Civic Theatre's Playwrights' Forum Festival's Adjudicator Award with Intro to Greek Theater in June 2025. She also premiered her play The American Letter at The Ephemerates Theater's staged reading in 2023 and was selected for the Pitch-Your-Play-Session at the 2024 Mid-America Theater Conference. The College of Southern Idaho Theater Program produced the play in 2024. Seyben is currently working on three full-length plays: A Beauty Mark, Nor’easter, and Doctors, along with a collection of personal essays, which have appeared in publications like The Brussels Review, The RavensPerch, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, Synkroniciti, and the ManifestStation.

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Recent college directing credits include Anna Karenina (adapted from Leo Tolstoy) by Helen Edmundson, American Hero by Bess Wohl, Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, Fefu and Her Friends by María Irene Fornés, and Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with music and lyrics by Roger Miller, and a book by William Hauptman. She also directed Jaclyn Backhaus’ You on the Moors Now, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in a new adaptation by Zinnie Harris, and Sophocles’ Oedipus in a new version by Ellen McLaughlin at the College of Southern Idaho. The local news channel, KMVT, and the local paper, Times-News, reviewed and recommended most of these plays.

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On the administrative side, she served as the chair of Management of Performing Arts and Performing Arts at Istanbul Bilgi University. She served as a board member of both Magic Valley Arts Council and JuMP Co. - Junior Musical Playhouse. Seyben recently became a member-at-large of the Middle Eastern Theater Focus Group in ATHE, which is committed to highlighting the scholarly and artistic output of Middle Eastern theater-makers and academics in the US and beyond.

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Seyben has recently published a book chapter entitled “Survival of the Weakest" in the volume, Exiled Scholars: Refugees or Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), and is working toward the publication of “Absence as Presence: Toward Multilingual Dramaturgy in Dream American and THE FRANCA RAME PROJECT” in another volume titled Theater of Resilience.  She is collaborating with a Spanish director to have A Beauty Mark produced in Barcelona.