Serkan Kaya was born in Leverkusen on July 24, 1977 to Turkish immigrants. In 2000, he began studying acting and musical theater at the Folkwang University in Essen, graduating in 2004. He had his first engagements at the Shakespeare Festival in Neuss and at the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen, where he played the King in Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost". He was particularly successful in musicals. From 2006 to 2008 he performed the role of Judas in "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Essen, and from 2008 to 2010 he played Anatoly in "Chess." In the Dortmund performance of "Evita" (2009-2010) he embodied Che, in the "Westside Story" in Magdeburg (2010) Bernardo. From 2011 to 2016 he appeared in Berlin at Potsdamer Platz in "Hinterm Horizont" as Udo Lindenberg.

From 2009, Kaya also took on roles in television and feature film productions, among them Ayşe Polat's "Luks Glück" ("Luk's Luck", 2010) and an episode of "Alarm für Cobra 11 - Die Autobahnpolizei" (2012). In 2014, he had a starring role in the humorous Austrian crime series "Die Detektive," about two very different brothers who take over their late father's detective agency and also end up solving the circumstances of his death.

On the big screen, he appeared in the crime comedy "Maria Mafiosi" as the great love of a small-town policewoman (Lisa Maria Potthoff) whose Italian father is involved in Mafia business. In the media satire "Lux - Krieger des Lichts" ("Lux: Warrior of Light", 2017) he had a small but important role as a confused cameraman, and in "Unheimlich perfekte Freunde" ("Double Trouble and the Magical Mirror", 2019) he was the sympathetic stepfather of the young main character.

Kaya played a central role in the award-winning TV movie "Der König von Köln" (2019), as an interim building inspector who is in danger of being corrupted by his environment. Kaya had series lead roles in "Andere Eltern" (2019-2020), a mockumentary series about a group of parents who found a daycare center as a parents' association, and as a police officer in the crime comedy series "KBV - Keine besonderen Vorkommnisse" (2021) - for which he received the German Acting Award as an actor in a comedic role.

Both series were directed by Lutz Heineking jr., who also cast Kaya in the feature film "Der Pfau" ("The Peacock", 2022), a comedy about five stressed-out bankers who have to travel to a team-building seminar in the Scottish Highlands.