Damla is a PhD candidate in the dual degree program of History of Art and Architecture and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her main interests are early Ottoman architectural culture, city building practices and transregional connectivities among the Lands of Rum, Greater Iran and Mamluk Syria. Her dissertation focuses on the emergence of the city of Amasya in the fifteenth century as a major Ottoman urban, political, cultural and artistic center in north central Anatolia. She holds a BA from the History Department of Boğaziçi University in İstanbul. She received her MA in 2015 from the same department with a thesis on the representation of calligraphers and practice of calligraphy in the early modern Ottoman biographical dictionaries of calligraphers.

Damla contributes to the project as a researcher exploring the examples of monumental calligraphy that appear on the foundational inscriptions of the newly-built Ottoman structures in Amasya and the broader region of North Central Anatolia. She is especially interested in understanding the transregional dynamics behind the frequent use of thuluth script in this frontier region where local artistic practices intermingled with technologies and skills that are brought from Greater Iran and Mamluk Syria via itinerant artistic and architectural workshops.