Selcen Küçüküstel was born in Turkey and completed her graduate studies in social anthropology. She has received her PhD degree at Humboldt University in Berlin with her study on nomadic reindeer herder/hunter Dukha of northern Mongolia, that focuses on  human-animal relations and indigenous concepts of domestication and wildness in the community. She has given classes in sociology and anthropology departments at Bahçesehir and Yeditepe University in Istanbul, University of Carlos III in Madrid and Humboldt University in Berlin. She worked as a post-doc researcher in RIVERS project at the university of Carlos III Madrid on indigenous people in Nepal and how they are  affected by hydropower projects and  their perceptions about rivers. At the moment she is working as a postdoc researcher at the University of Barcelona, studying how climate change is effecting indigenous ecological knowledge in Siberia and Amazons. Her main academic interests concern ecological anthropology, indigenous people, nomadic societies, Siberia and visual anthropology.
 

Apart from her academic career, Selcen has also been working as a photojournalist, producing stories for various geography and culture magazines in Turkey. She has been covering mostly anthropological stories from various corners of the world from Yemen to Indonesia. At the moment she works for MAGMA magazine. She has also been working as co-director, line producer and assistant director in documentary movies both in Turkey and internationally including ARTE channel. She likes to combine her academic career with photojournalism, looking into  the stories she covers from an anthropological perspective.