Dr. Vedat Akman Has Spent 35 Years Refusing to Choose Between Money and Art

On November 30, 1990, the art gallery at Brooklyn College opened a photography show by Vedat Akman, an economics student from Istanbul who was still working toward his master's degree. He had come to New York to study markets. Along the way he had picked up a minor in photography, and within eight months his prints had traveled from a campus wall to the Gelabert Art Center in SoHo and then to the Rebecca Tate Gallery on Broadway.

Plenty of people would call that a detour. Akman treated it as the other half of his education. Today Dr. Vedat Akman is an Associate Professor of Finance at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Dubai, adjunct faculty at the American University in Dubai, and a painter who built his own studio on the Aegean coast of Turkey. The banker's vocabulary and the photographer's eye have run side by side for his entire working life, and he has never seemed in much of a hurry to pick one.

A finance scholar shaped by three countries

Akman grew up in Istanbul and finished at a British high school there before leaving for the United States. At Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, he earned a bachelor's and then a master's degree in economics between 1986 and 1992. The schooling kept widening after that. He completed an LL.M. in international commercial law at the University of Nottingham in 1995, a PhD in finance and banking at Kadir Has University in Istanbul in 2010, and an MBA from Fordham University in New York the following year.

Those degrees sat on top of real work. Before he settled into academia, Akman was a research manager at major Turkish banks and stock exchange firms in Istanbul. He produced business programs for television and wrote newspaper columns. Later he taught at Kadir Has University and Beykent University, where his subjects were the working machinery of money. One of his early books, written with colleagues in 2001, introduced readers to risk management in banks. Another, written with Uğur Özgöker in 2007, walked students through scientific research methods.

Crossroads, a film festival about leaving home

His other life kept surfacing through Junior Chamber International, the global network of young leaders. In 1998 he was named a TOYP Turkey country winner, JCI's honor for outstanding young people. A few years later he compiled Global Immigrant Stories, a collection of firsthand accounts written by immigrants themselves and published in Istanbul in 2006. At the JCI European Conference in Maastricht in June 2007, the book was named Best Publication in Europe.

Migration became his recurring subject. Through JCI Istanbul, Dr. Vedat Akman founded the Crossroads International Short Film Festival, which asked filmmakers around the world for short films about building a life in an adopted country. He gave it a slogan that reads like a business plan and a manifesto at once, "Young Entrepreneurs Hand by Hand with Young Film Directors," and used it to put JCI's commercially minded members in the same room as emerging directors. In a 2011 article for CINEJ Cinema Journal, the University of Pittsburgh publication he helped found, he argued that cinema can teach people to respect life and live in harmony in places where politics tends to fall short.

The Bodrum years and a turn to painting

In 2020 Akman stepped away from university life and moved to Bodrum, the old sponge diving town on Turkey's southwest coast. The timing carried a small irony. That same year the Institute of Economic Development and Social Research (İKSAD) gave him its Science Award, an honor Beykent University announced in January 2021, right as the finance professor was settling into life as a full time painter.

In Bodrum he founded Cetus Art Studio and moved into organic painting. His canvases keep circling back to nature and time, and to the duties people owe one another. Akman approaches art as a way of thinking rather than a matter of decoration, and the work shows it.

The studio years produced two painting exhibitions in quick succession: the first at Hey Joe in Bodrum on November 2, 2022, the second at Ortakent Yağhane on February 6, 2023. His work has also been shown at the entrance of the Bodrum Maritime Museum. The sea crept into his writing too. One of his Turkish language books studies sea sponges, from their biology to their economic and cultural weight in a region that once lived off them. He has published nine books on art through Google Play Books, and in 2026 he released On the Trail of the Negative.

Back in the classroom, this time in Dubai

The studio never turned into a full retirement. Akman went back to teaching in the United Arab Emirates, where he is now full time faculty at Plekhanov University's Dubai campus and adjunct faculty at the American University in Dubai. After more than two decades in university teaching, he still covers business management, banking, and finance, the same ground he first mapped in Istanbul.

The painting came with him. His creative work now reaches audiences in Dubai and Abu Dhabi as well as Bodrum, which means a student who sits through his lecture on banking risk in the morning could, in principle, walk into one of his exhibitions that evening. Few finance professors can say that.

Where the two paths meet

There is a tidy way to describe him: Turkish American finance scholar with a painting habit. It misses most of the story. The Brooklyn photographs, the immigrant stories, the film festival, and the Bodrum canvases all grow from the same instinct, a fascination with how people move through systems larger than themselves. Sometimes the system is a market. Sometimes it is a border.

Vedat Akman studied money to understand how the world works. He picks up a brush to understand what it means. More than three decades after that first show in Brooklyn, he is still doing both, and he still has not said which one is the day job.