Renowned food artist of Istanbul, Dilara Erbay and designer mixologists of Brooklyn, Guinea Pig Group, will present a collaborative live performance where Turkey’s unique culinary secrets will be paired with the artisanal cocktails of Brooklyn. While Dilara Erbay reveals her “traditional and experimental” creations of food with exotic and natural ingredients, The Guinea Pig Group mixologists will be spontaneously blending cocktails in their shakers inspired by the sculpture as it progresses. Take part in this experimental affair of creativity that combines unique samples of food and drinks. As you mark your calendars for the weekend, also make plans to see Dilara’s unique food installation, Wishing Tree, at the Design: Istanbul-New York booth.

This event is free; pre-registration is required here.

This program is made possible by a generous grant from the Turkish Cultural Foundation.

The American Turkish Society is putting Turkey on the map of design in New York City with “Design: Istanbul-New York,” a debut exhibition of innovative products from Turkish designers in the 3rd edition of Wanted Design. Spearheaded by two French founders, Wanted Design curates exhibition of international designers, and serves as a convivial platform for design events such as conversation series, design workshops, demos and more. Running concurrently with International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), this year’s event will be held from May 18-20, 2013.

“Design: Istanbul-New York” will feature seven creations selected from a group of submissions responding to an open call for entries, by an international jury of distinguished design professionals and industry leaders. Gaye Cevikel, founder of luxury design brand Gaia & Gino; Ferda Kolatan, co-founder of su11 architecture+design in New York; Defne Koz, founder of Defne Koz Studio; Ayse Birsel Seck, co-founder and creative director of Birsel + Seck, Ali Tayar, founder of Parallel Design Partnership were on the jury for the open call. Expertly curated products include furniture, table top house wares, lighting and carpet.

The program will feature an opening banquet with Brooklyn based mixologists Guinea Pig Group, edible performance by food artist Dilara Erbay, and an open discussion on the business of design.

Check out the teaser video from last year's fair:

WantedDesign, second edition May 2012 - Terminal Stores, NYC from WANTEDDESIGN NYC on Vimeo.

This program is made possible by a generous grant from the Turkish Cultural Foundation.

Thank you to our sponsors Sara Bengur Interiors, Turkish Culture and Tourism Office, Armaggan Art & Design Gallery, and Dada Goldberg.

Special thanks to Abracadabra, AlumniTurk, KAGIDER, Turkishny, and TurkishWIN for their promotional efforts; Designer Deger Cengiz, for his innovative booth concept & design; Albin Lohr-Jones, for booth installation & Deniz Ayaz for donating her talent in designing our materials.

"My mission is to find out the contemporary in Turkish cultural forms, then translate them into a completely new, future design language of Turkey." - Gaye Cevikel

Gaye Cevikel, founder of luxury design brand GAIA&GINO will lead a rich and interactive conversation on "Design Entrepreneurship,” about the challenges and rewards of being an entrepreneur, with design writer and style editor Melissa Feldman, to be held at Gallery 6, Terminal Stores. Arguably Turkey’s first female design entrepreneur, Gaye is known for combining the ornately traditional and contemporary design by asking design luminaries such as Karim Rashid, Arik Levy, Andree Putman, Jaime Hayon, Constantin Boym, Christian Ghion, Harry Allen, Sebastian Bergne, Defne Koz Nendo, David Adjaye, Yves Behar and Aruliden to design innovative, witty and story telling products which typify the brand’s identity. Previously a Senior Style Editor for House & Garden, Feldman has also been a contributing editor to Harpers Bazaar and Coastal Living magazines. In 2007 Melissa founded Stroll Productions, an editorial and media production company, which is an outgrowth of Stroll, a magazine devoted to outdoor art and street culture that Feldman published over 20 years ago. Cocktails to follow at the Design:Istanbul-NY booth.

This event is free. Pre-registration is required here..

This program is made possible by a generous grant from the Turkish Cultural Foundation.

Hande Akcayli and Murat Kocyigit of Mashallah created a lighting product “Pleat Box” that was made to recall the silhouette of textile. Founded in 2008, Mashallah is an interdisciplinary design studio dedicated to the poetry of design, art and technology.

Ali Bakova designed a unique wine set, complete with bottle and drinking glass. Bakova graduated from Industrial Design Department of Middle East Technical University–Turkey. Today, he is a freelance design consultant, focused on design movements, strategies, as well as the interaction between arts and artifacts.


Umut Demirel's “Attractive,” a mirror and magnet combination promotes the convenience of grabbing-and-going. Demirel graduated from the industrial product design program at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Turkey and studied at Volda University’s Media Department in Norway. He has fostered an interest in physics and mathematics, and has begun focusing on incorporating those interests in his designs.

Also a Mimar Sinan University Fine Arts alum, Tamer Nakisci’s modern design of “Relax” plates represent tableware that creates different patterns when stacked. Based in Istanbul, in the newly established Studio/Nakisci, Tamer Nakisci started his career at Fiat Advanced Design Concept Lab - Milan followed by his first international award in 2005 at the Nokia Benelux Design Awards.



A unique style of rug design, “Tuluat” by Koray Ozgen is about transforming and recording the common mind of the designer and the weaver into a notation. Based in Paris, Koray Ozgen provides multi-disciplinary design solutions for a variety of clients and designs his own range of distinctive objects for the Ozgen Design Collection.

The Istanbul-based Muzz Design team, made up of designers Erin Turkoglu and Melodi Bozkurt, submitted “Novela Vessels,” a family of tabletop products.Both Erin and Melodi attended Pratt Institute's Industrial Design program which inspired their creative union – Muzz Design. They recently moved their studio to Istanbul, where they both currently live and work.

Keeping in line with tableware products to be exhibited, designer Can Yalman submitted the “Tearend Teacup and Saucer.” Yalman studied Product and Furniture Design at Parsons School of Design in New York and is an award-winning designer, currently residing in Istanbul.

Congratulations to our selected designers! We thank everyone who submitted an application.

The American Turkish Society and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University (ISAW) are pleased to bring you the sixth lecture in their series on the archaeology of Turkey featuring Professor Lorenzo d'Alfonso, Associate Professor of Western Asian Archaeology and History at NYU (ISAW).

After a four-year survey in Southern Cappadocia, in 2011 archaeological excavations began at Kınık Hoyuk, in the province of Nigde, Turkey. The topography of the site suggested that this was one of the regional centers of Pre-classical Anatolia. The identification is still open, but surface finds and the first two campaigns of excavation indicate that one of the main settlement phases of Kınık was during the Middle Iron Age. The latest phase of the incredibly well preserved citadel walls date to this period and are the focus of a stabilization project, with the goal of developing the site into an open-area museum.

While the latest phases of the site occupation will be presented in association with the main results of the survey, the lecture will focus on the floruit of the Tuwana kingdom and its aftermath, the Late Iron Age, for which the excavations provided interesting and novel results.

The event is free and open to the public, however space is limited and pre-registration is required. You may register here

Reception to follow

Professor Lorenzo d'Alfonso earned his MA in Ancient Civilizations from the University of Pavia (1997) and his PhD in Ancient Anatolian and Aegean Studies from the University of Florence (2002). Since then he has worked as a post-doctoral fellow and adjunct professor at the Universities of Mainz, Konstanz, and Pavia.

His main research interests concern the social, juridical, and political history of Syria and Anatolia under the Hittite Empire and during its aftermath (16th-7th centuries BC).

Join us for a conversation about “Ask” (Forty Rules of Love) written by internationally acclaimed Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak.

Dubbed by the Times (UK) as “a gorgeous, jeweled, luxurious book [where] the past and the present fit together beautifully in a passionate defense of passion itself,” Forty Rules of Love tells the tale of two parallel journeys towards Love – one set in modern times between American housewife Ella Rubenstein and the mystical Dutch novelist Aziz Zahara, and another in the thirteenth-century, between Sufi masters Rumi and Shams of Tabriz.

Please note: Elif Shafak will not be in attendance, but all attendees are required to read the book prior to the book club meeting.

The discussion will be moderated by Frances Kazan, an international author, lecturer, producer, and arts supporter, whose published work includes academic writing in “Halide Edib ve Amerika”, as well as historically-inspired fiction in works such as the 1986 “Goodnight Little Sister,” the 2001 “Halide’s Gift”, and the upcoming title “The Dervish.”

More about the author

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Writing in Turkish and English, Shafak blends Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling, bringing out the myriad stories of women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, youth and global souls.

The American Turkish Society’s Young Society Leaders (YSLs) program presents a lecture and exhibition by Young Society Leader and UPenn faculty member Ferda Kolatan showcasing design proposals for a mixed-use cultural center by his graduate architecture students from the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

In recent years contemporary design and architecture has been going through a fundamental transformation. Aided by new technologies ranging from software applications to advanced fabrication techniques, we are witnessing an emerging sensibility for intricate formal, structural, and material organizations. This tendency presents a significant departure from the ethic of simplicity and functionality as the prime governing principle of design thinking throughout most of the 20th century and demonstrates a larger cultural desire to mine technology’s capacity in pursuit of novel design expressions.

This exhibition presents seven cutting edge projects, which investigate how complex geometries commonly found in Turkish patterns could be used to generate new ideas for formal-structural surfaces applicable for building façades. The resulting project proposals show a mixed-use program of gallery spaces with offices for a newly conceptualized headquarters for the American Turkish Society.

Teaching Assistant: Hart Marlow. Participating students are Kelley Carrol, Eyal Einik, Mairen Foley, Catherine Guentert, Yoonsun Hwang, Andreas Kostopoulos, Ryan Leichtweisz, Patrick Morgan, Arjan Ofeany, Nathaniel Schlundt, Jiarui Su, Ryan Wall, Meagan Whetstone, Hayley Wong.

Pre-registration by February 12 is required for this event. To register, please click on the "register" link below and follow the instructions.

About the Young Society Leaders (YSLs)

The Young Society Leaders program convenes a group of accomplished professionals from the fields of business, law, medicine, journalism, academia and the arts, with a demonstrated record of leadership ability and commitment to serve the U.S.-Turkish society at large. The program, inaugurated in 2011 with another outstanding group, aims to nurture the next generation leaders and to positively impact issues that matter to American-Turkish Community.

Special thanks to C24 Gallery for being a venue sponsor, and to The Guinea Pig Group for providing cocktails for the event

Come and meet with the American Turkish Society and representatives from AFS-USA who will answer questions and provide more information on AFS USA summer programs in Turkey.

As part of its education mission, The American Turkish Society partners with AFS-USA on a number of teaching and student exchange programs, allowing the two organizations to further their mutual goal of enhancing cross-cultural understanding and strengthening educational ties between US and Turkey.

During this session we will be discussing an opportunity for American high school students to enjoy cultural activities and excursions in Turkey, while staying with a host family partnered through AFS Turkey.

For more details on the ATS and AFS-USA partnership, and programs in Turkey, please register to join this event by Friday, February 8.

The American Turkish Society's Meet the Ambassadors Series presents a luncheon discussion on the Syrian Crisis with H.E. Ambassador Halit Cevik,Permanent Representative of Turkey to the U.N., and H.R.H. Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, Permanent Representative of Jordan to the U.N.

Space is limited. Pre-registration is strictly required.

To register, please click the “register for this event” link at the bottom of this section or fill out the registration form below and fax it to The American Turkish Society at 212.583.7615 by January 16, 2013. For questions, please email info@americanturkishsociety.org

*This event is closed to press*

H.E. Ambassador Halit Çevik was Undersecretary for Political Affairs at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2009, having previously served as Ambassador of Turkey to Syria from November 2004 to August 2009. In addition to holding several positions in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2004, including that of Deputy Director-General of Central Europe and Baltic Region, he worked in the Prime Minister's Office as Deputy Special Adviser in 1999. He has served various diplomatic postings at Turkish Embassies in Beijing, Zurich, and Athens, among others. From December 1993 to August 1995, Mr. Çevik was Deputy Special Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, having served as Head of Section at the Ministry's Department of Maritime Affairs in 1993.

About Ambassador Prince Zeid

H.R.H. Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein was Jordan's Ambassador to the United States and non-resident Ambassador to Mexico until 2010. He previously held the position of Permanent Representative to the UN from 2000-2007 and Deputy Permanent Representative from 1996-2000. Prince Zeid played a central role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court and in September 2002 was elected the first president of the Assembly of State Parties of the International Criminal Court. Prince Zeid also served as a political affairs officer in UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia from February 1994 to February 1996. Prince Zeid holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge (Christ's College).