Tanju Girişken is a director, writer, and actor. Born in 1989 in İzmir, Turkey, he studied acting at the Istanbul State Conservatory and later at Kadir Has University. After initial work in Istanbul's independent theater scene, he was a member of the ensemble at Istanbul City Theatre from 2014 to 2018, where he performed in productions including Cyrano de Bergerac, The Glass Menagerie, Treasure Island, and Macbeth.

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In 2017, Girişken moved to Germany and appeared at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in Nurkan Erpulat's production Lö Grand Bal Almanya. He then studied directing, first at the Theaterakademie Regensburg and from 2021 to 2023 in the Master's program in Directing for Music and Spoken Theatre / Performative Arts at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich in cooperation with the Bavarian Theatre Academy August Everding.

His artistic work moves between Istanbul and major theater institutions in Germany. It is characterized by performance, migration, resistance, multilingualism, and contemporary forms of storytelling. In his productions, Girişken combines biographical, political, and documentary materials with performative rewriting and collective work processes.

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For his temporary/permanent position at the Bavarian Theatre Academy August Everding, he received the Audience Award at the Körber Festival for Young Directors in Hamburg in 2023. Further works have been created at, among others, the Deutsches Theater Göttingen, the Schauspiel Dortmund, the Residenztheater Munich, the Stadttheater Osnabrück, the Nationaltheater Mannheim, the Stadttheater Trier, the Stadttheater Gießen, and the Salzburg Festival.