Anastasia M. Ashman is an award-winning writer and producer of intellectually-stimulating multimedia entertainment projects that further the worldwide cultural conversation. A literary impresario and cultural feminist personality, she capitalizes on 10-years of expatriatism and a decade of work in American media and entertainment. She aims to pin-point and put into context truths about how (female) identity is formed, changes, and lives in our thoughts and actions.

She co-edited the nonfiction anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey (Seal Press 03/06, Dogan Kitap 9/05) which has risen to national top ten bestselling spots in the US and the UK in multiple categories like Turkey, Middle East, travel literature and women’s studies. It was a #1 national English-language general interest bestseller in Turkey. The foreword to Turkish editions including the Turkish translation Türkçe Sevmek, was composed by Turkish novelist Elif Shafak. The expatriate literature collection has been endorsed by NBC's Today Show, National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet, Daily Telegraph, Globe and Mail and the International Herald Tribune, while the book’s literary ambassadorship has been widely supported in Turkey. In North America, the anthology is studied in seven universities, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Her writing on art, society and culture has appeared in publications worldwide, from the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong to the Village Voice in New York. She has written about Istanbul for National Geographic Traveler and Cornucopia,the glossy magazine for connoisseurs of Turkish culture in 54 countries. She also appears with Susan Orlean in the women’s humor collection The Thong Also Rises (Travelers’ Tales, 09/05) and alongside New York writers like Jonathan Lethem, Calvin Trillin, and Colson Whitehead in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York (Plume-Penguin, 09/06).

She is currently at work on a forensic memoir of friendship; and Expat Harem related producing projects like a screenplay adaptation of her wedding tale "Like An Ottoman Princess". Anastasia has almost a decade of experience in media and entertainment circles in New York and Los Angeles, working for top literary agents and major producers of motion pictures, television, music and Broadway theatre.

Anastasia coproduced the Near East’s 1st Global Nomad Salon in association with Janera.com, part of a worldwide series of intellectual dinner parties that the Economist magazine calls “jetsetters with a conscience.” With TEDGlobal Fellow, women’s health specialist and author Dr. Nassim Assefi she is developing an annual gathering of globally mobile progressives. In 2009 she became a founding member of TED Global, the international conference of ideas in Oxford, England.

She is currently at work on a forensic memoir of friendship, developing the screen adaptation of her Expat Harem wedding tale “Like An Ottoman Princess”, as well as a documentary project about the soap opera life of a 6th century Byzantine princess who spurred an emperor to create an architectural wonder of the world.

Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Anastasia holds a degree in Classical Greek, Roman and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College on Philadelphia's mainline. She has been an expatriate for 10 years, living, studying, and working in Rome and Kuala Lumpur and since 2003 in Istanbul, where she lives with her Turkish husband.

Anastasia is a top ten Twitterer in Istanbul and her microblog shares resources for women, writers, readers, travelers, expats, Turkophiles and culturati of all stripes.