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, 43 master's and 30 PhD programs. The university is home to more than 8,000 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, musicologist, music critic and writer. She is the daughter of one of the greatest authors of Turkish literature Sabahattin Ali (1907–1948).
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.
Füreya Koral was a pioneering ceramics artist born into a prominent artistic family in Turkey.
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.
Marguerite Van Cook is an English artist, writer, musician/singer and filmmaker. She was born in Portsmouth, England and now resides in New York City on the Lower East Side, in the East Village. She attended Portsmouth College of Art and Design, Northumbria University Graphic and Fine Arts programs, BMCC, and Columbia University for English (BA) and Modern European Studies (MA). She holds a PH.D in French on eighteenth century political economics in the work of women writers from CUNY Graduate Center. She has also served as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and currently at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York.
Elfriede Martha Abbe 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.
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.
The first Turkish painters appeared no earlier than the mid-19th century during the Ottoman Empire era. The first art academy in Turkey was established in the 19th century but was meant only for male art students. Therefore, art remained gender-segregated until 1914, when an art school for women was established, but still, they could work under strict rules since working on nude models of the opposite sex was prohibited. The daughters of the enlightened people in Turkish society were allowed to participate in art privately, and they could not make it a career. Therefore, coming from such families, a girl child could get support from the family but only to practice art as a hobby and not as a profession. The portrayal of female artists in Turkey initially did not intend to show them as skilled people as their male counterparts could have been portrayed. It showed the female artists as people operating in the shadows of male artists and thus could not fit on the same continuum. The first Turkish woman painter was Müfide Kadri. (1889-1912) and the first Turkish woman sculptor was Sabiha Ziya Bengütaş. The first art academy for girls was Sanayi'i Nefise which became co-educational in 1914. During the Turkish Republic-era, art training was promoted by the government, and beginning in 1930 painting courses were added to the curriculum of the schools.
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.
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.
Margaret Wharton (1943-2014) was an American artist, known for her sculptures of deconstructed chairs. She deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined everyday objects to make works of art that could be whimsical, witty or simply thought-provoking in reflecting her vision of the world.
Hayal Pozanti is a Turkish-American artist, based in the United States. Pozanti became internationally known in the early 2010s for her bright abstract paintings of geometric forms, based on a hieroglyphic alphabet which Pozanti invented to reflect on the relationship between human behaviour, artificial intelligence and technology.
Mehmet Ömer Koç is a Turkish businessman, art collector, and chairman of Koç Holding. In 2013 Forbes estimated his net worth at US$1.1 billion.
