Kutluğ Ataman is an acclaimed Turkish-American contemporary artist and feature filmmaker. Ataman's films are known for their strong characterization and humanity. His early art works examine the ways in which people and communities create and rewrite their identities through self-expression, blurring the line between reality and fiction. His later works focus on history and geography as man-made constructs. He won the Carnegie Prize for his works Kuba in 2004. In the same year he was nominated for Turner Prize for his work Twelve.
The Koç School is a private coeducational school in Turkey founded by Vehbi Koç, one of Turkey's wealthiest businessmen. The school comprises a high school that pioneered the IB program in Turkey and an elementary school. Prospective students gain admission into the high school based on their achievements on the nationwide examination for high schools in Turkey.
Koç University is a non-profit private university in Istanbul, Turkey. It started education in temporary buildings in İstinye in 1993, and moved to its current Rumelifeneri campus near Sarıyer in 2000. Koç University is ranked highest in Turkey according to the 2022 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 2022 QS World University Rankings. Koç University currently consists of Colleges of Social Sciences and Humanities, Administrative Sciences and Economics, Science, Engineering, Law, Nursing and Medicine. Koç University offers 22 undergraduate, 29 graduate and 30 PhD programs. The university is home to around 7,000 students. The university accepts international students from various countries and has an extensive network of over 250 partner-universities including University of California and other universities such as Northwestern University, Cornell University and Georgetown University.
Filiz Ali is a Turkish pianist and musicologist.
The Koç family is a Turkish family of business people founded by Vehbi Koç, one of the wealthiest self-made people in Turkey. His grandsons, the third generation of the Koç family, today run Turkey's largest group of companies, Koç Holding, the only Turkish company on the Fortune Global 500 list. In 2016, the family's wealth was estimated at US$8 billion, ranking them as the wealthiest family in Turkey. According to Murat Bardakçı, their lineage can be traced to Hacı Bayram-ı Veli.
Suna Koç Kıraç was a Turkish businesswoman and a billionaire.
Nevin Çokay was a Turkish painter and high school teacher of art and history of art.
Jane R. Hammond is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She was influenced by the late composer John Cage. She collaborated with the poet John Ashbery, making 62 paintings based on titles suggested by Ashbery; she also collaborated with the poet Raphael Rubinstein.
Füreya Koral was a pioneering ceramics artist born into a prominent artistic family in Turkey.
Sharon Louden is an American artist known for her whimsical use of the line. Her paintings, drawings, animations, sculptures, and installations are often centered on lines or linear abstractions and their implied actual movement. Through her work, she creates what she calls "anthropomorphic individuals." Although abstract and formal, she feels they have human-like aspects within their minimal state, made of simple lines and gestures. In reference to her minimalist paintings, Louden has been called "the Robert Ryman of the 21st century."
Nancy Davenport is a Canadian photographer. Her photography, animations and digital work have been exhibited at venues including the Liverpool Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, DHC/Art Fondation pour l’art Contemporain in Montreal and the First Triennial of Photography & Video at the International Center of Photography, NY.
Elfriede Martha Abbe (1919–2012) was an American sculptor, wood engraver and botanical illustrator, often displaying nature and simple country living inspired by her Upstate New York home. A self-publisher, Abbe created numerous hand-printed books, which she printed on a printing press in her studio.
Gizem Karaca is a Turkish actress and model who represented her country at the Miss World 2011 competition.
Rosemarie Beck was an American abstract expressionist, figurative expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She was married to the writer and editor Robert Phelps.
David Brewster is an American painter active in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Josephine Powell was an American photographer, traveller, and a collector of Anatolian ethnographic objects and textiles.
Martha Neill Upton was a watercolorist, sculptor and studio quilt artist. Her quilted tapestries helped quilts become seen as fine art, rather than craft work, during the early 1970s. Her quilts were shown in the first major museum exhibition of non-traditional quilts, The New American Quilt at New York's Museum of Arts and Design, then called the Museum of Contemporary Craft, in 1976.
Mehmet Ömer Koç is a Turkish businessman, art collector, and chairman of Koç Holding. In 2013, Forbes ranked him as No.1268 richest person in the world with a net worth of $1.1 billion.
